Intercourse between the living and the dead
by MillieJoan
Summary: He is here forever, and marking time was never going to change that, anyway.
1. Part 1

___Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me, much as I wish they did._

* * *

__

A/N: This story is complete, and will be posted in several parts over the next couple of weeks or so. For anyone who has been following Camerado for all these (many) years, I just want to let you know that I AM still working on it. I had a bit of writer's block when I started the newest chapter, and decided to take a break from it for a bit and write this little story, which has been rattling around in my head for awhile now.

However, in the meantime, I do have some gorgeous fan art for Camerado I'd love to share, by the very talented Proulxes. Hopefully this will help tide you all over until I can get the next chapter banged out! (Remove spaces from the links!)

proulxes dot deviantart dot com / art/ Camerado-Rough-New-Prizes-Part-2-369103006?q=gallery%3Aproulxes&qo=0

proulxes dot deviantart dot com /art /Camerado-Take-Your-Lovers-On-The-Road-With-You-370858161

proulxes dot deviantart dot com /# / art/ Camerado-Passionate-Kisses-of-Parting-part-2-372612295?hf=1 

* * *

** [Intercourse] between the living and the dead **

Severus is floating when they arrive for his body just after dawn. The morning sun has just begun to thin the mist that settled net-like over the hills during the night, a night that Severus spent unmoored in every sense of the word. He watches as though through someone else's eyes as Hagrid stumps into the room, followed closely by Hermione Granger and -

Severus tries to inhale so swiftly that did he actually still have breath, he would have choked on it. For Harry Potter is edging into the room behind the others, his clothing singed and torn, his hair and skin filthy, his glasses askew. He looks exhausted and nervous and about ready to drop, but he is undeniably _alive._ He hangs slightly back, looking overwhelmed, while Hagrid shakes his great shaggy head and Granger reaches out as though to touch the body then pulls her hand back. Severus is startled to see tears coursing down her cheeks, and dumbfounded when he watches Hagrid carefully, almost tenderly, gather the body into his arms and cradle it against his beard. Together, the three of them leave the shack, never speaking a word, a solemn procession.

Severus feels a sort of phantom ache behind his eyes where tears he no longer has long to fall.

* * *

The first time Hermione sees Professor Snape's ghost after his death, she is not certain she's seen him at all; through her tears the whole world looks hazy, and he is but a wisp on the edges of her vision, a man-shaped patch of unseasonable fog. She has been running, following her feet and not her head in her desperation to get _away, away,_ though why her feet should have brought her to _this_ dreadful place, she doesn't know. Realizing where she is, she stumbles and falls, skidding on gravel, knees thumping against the ground and palms scraped raw. She stares up at the Shrieking Shack, at its weathered boards and roof missing shingles, and thinks she might be sick.

And then - then she sees him, just the flash of him through a broken window-pane, above the sagging boards that haphazardly cover it. And her heart starts beating faster - _No_ - and she rises and brushes her palms on the sides of her robes, bits of gravel falling to ground around her feet.

Inside, the shack is much as she remembers it. She stands, hands balled into fists, heart thumping hard enough to hurt, and wills herself not to run. _It's just a building,_ she thinks, but then, so is Hogwarts, and she wasn't strong enough to stay _there_ for more than a few minutes without breaking down. She breathes deeply through her nose, staring at the window where she thinks she saw him-there is nothing there but the tattered remains of curtains faded to a nothing sort of color by the weak Scottish sunlight - and then focuses on the rest of the room, the thick grey dust coating everything, even the floor. Even the bloodstain on the floor. She lurches backward, out the door.

She saw him. She is sure of it.

* * *

She returns the following day, Apparating to the shack's doorstep. Her breathing is shallow as she pushes the door open with her fingertips, her muscles tense. It takes a great deal of determination not to turn around and sprint down the hill and not stop running until she has reached Hogsmeade.

It is a bright day, and inside the shack sunlight slants through the cracks between boards over the windows, dust motes dancing merrily in the beams of light. There is no sign of anyone else-alive or dead-in the room. Hermione keeps her eyes carefully off the dark brown stain on the floorboards.

The staircase creaks when she ascends. Before her is a door that sags on its hinges and swings open at the smallest nudge.

It, too, creaks.

There is something unsettling about the bedroom behind the door. Like the room below, the floorboards and walls here are scored with claw marks, but the musty smell of the place, the sight of the bed, narrow and metal-framed, the linens yellow and stiff, the counterpane thick with dust—and the pillow indented at its center, as though the shack's previous occupant had gotten up one morning and simply forgotten to return—makes Hermione shiver. The entire room is eerie.

But not as eerie as the figure in the corner, hovering three or four inches above the floor.

Hermione inhales sharply and ends up choking on dust, triggering an attack of coughing that has her doubled over, fist pressed to her mouth. When it finally eases, she raises her eyes very, very slowly to the corner, certain the apparition will have disappeared, but he is still there. His arms are crossed in front of his chest and his new vantage point makes it all the easier for him to look condescendingly at her down his great hooked nose.

Hermione's throat clicks several times as she tries to speak. "P-Professor Snape?" she finally whispers, and takes one step into the room.

He gazes at her for a moment longer before responding. "In the flesh," he says. His top lip curls into a sneer when she recoils from his words. "So to speak." He looms closer, close enough for her to see where the edges of the wound on his neck gape open, the surrounding skin pearly-white, the wound itself a deep silver, almost black.

She is breathing far too quickly, horror-struck and fascinated. "Oh. Yes. Sir, I thought I saw you yesterday," she says. She tries to keep her eyes on his face. "I was sure, but then you were gone…"

"I am a ghost, Miss Granger. I am more than capable of vanishing through walls or ceilings should I wish to."

The implication is surprising. "But you didn't wish to now?"

"Obviously."

"Why not, sir?"

His expression of irritation is exactly as she remembers it from school. "Clearly," he says, disdain dripping from every syllable, "graduation has not cured you of your incessant need to ask questions."

Hermione opens her mouth, indignant words dancing on the tip of her tongue - _Clearly death hasn't cured you of your propensity for being a berk_ - but she swallows them whole when Snape's ghost bares his teeth at her - _Oh God, they're bloody, oh God_ - and she feels as though she has been thrown back to several months before, hearing her professor's screams, watching his body hit the Shack's dirty floor, his blood streaming from the wound in his throat, staining his shirt, his coat, his fingers where they scrabbled futilely against his throat. The silver rivulets of his memories pouring from his every orifice, his expression one of panic. He'd died, desperate and afraid and… She sees his body laid out beside the others in the Great Hall after the battle was finally - finally - over, his lips hanging open in rigor-mortis stiffness over his appalling teeth, which were speckled with blood. She feels, again, sickness and shame mingling, churning in her stomach.

"I haven't graduated," she blurts to fill the increasingly awkward silence. "I was supposed to take my NEWTs yesterday - Professor McGonagall offered them to anyone whose seventh year was interrupted by the war - but I… couldn't." She is staring at her trainers, her pulse a distracting staccato beat in her ears. "I panicked. I didn't expect… I haven't been back to the castle since the battle and I just couldn't…"

She waits for Snape to snarl at her, but when she glances up his translucent face is an utter blank but for the glitter of his impossibly dark eyes.

"I don't know if you've seen Hogwarts since… I just… so much is still in shambles and then the Great Hall is so different…" The Charmed ceiling is, in fact, no longer Charmed, and it was the sight of the heavy gray blocks of the stone ceiling, so much lower than the vastness of the sky it once portrayed, that finally sent Hermione racing, her mouth tasting of vomit, out of the school before she had even checked in for the exams for which she had been preparing since she was eleven years-old.

"Ah," Snape says, his tone distant. "Seeing Hogwarts would pose something of a challenge, now I am tethered to the place of my death."

The heat of mortification washes over Hermione's entire body. "Oh God, of course-I'm so sorry," she says. How could she be so very tactless?

Snape shrugs. He looks as though he would very much like to be elsewhere. Or for Hermione to be elsewhere. Or both.

"I did not elude you today for a reason," he says then, fixing his gaze somewhere over her shoulder. "I would prefer that my continued… existence, such as it is… remain a secret. I've no wish to spend eternity being bothered. Do not tell anyone." He cuts his eyes sharply in her direction. "Assuming, of course, that you have not already done so."

"No, sir," she says. She'd nearly Floo'd both Harry and Ron the previous night, but a mixture of grief and guilt and shame at her weakness, at having left before her exams even began, had stopped her. She blinks, feeling the sting of tears only seconds before they begin to fall, salty trails down her cheeks, leaking into the corners of her mouth. She stuffs her fingers into her mouth, childishly, and curls her shoulders as though she could pull herself into a shell, like a snail. The gasping sobs that emerge from between her fingers are loud in the otherwise silent room.

"I'm sorry, sir," she manages. "I just - this is so - I didn't expect to really find you - I'm so sorry you're dead, I'm so sorry -"

The metaphorical ghosts of all the war's dead have been haunting her for months, creeping into her dreams, stealing her breath at odd times during her waking moments. But all of the other deaths she witnessed only peripherally, while she was fighting for her own life. Snape's death was different-immediate and horrible.

And his ghost - his ghost is _real._

"I'm so sorry," she whispers again, and then it is as though whatever fragile hold Snape's ghost had on his self-control has snapped, and he is surging toward her, coming so near that Hermione is suddenly awash with a sensation of cold.

"Get _out!"_ he screams. His eyes, so blank a moment earlier, are utterly mad; he is a hundred times more terrifying than he ever was when he was their teacher, and Hermione stumbles back, Snape's ghost whooshing after her until she finds herself at the top of the stairs. She nearly falls backward but catches hold of the railing at the last minute, and then she is running, mindlessly running, down the steps and out the door and through the grass. She is halfway to Hogsmeade before she stops, lungs straining for air, listening for the thud of footfalls behind her before realizing - _Idiot_ - that even if Snape were able to follow her this far, she would never hear him coming.

* * *

Every Hogwarts student knows from their first Welcome Feast that ghosts are real and that they continue to exist after their hearts have stopped beating because they chose to do so. As a Firstie, Severus decided quite early on that such an existence was not only cowardly but stupid; he had experienced enough ugliness already to be quite baffled by anyone _choosing_ to remain behind if they had the chance to go on.

So the irony of finding himself a ghost is not lost on Severus. He remembers the pain of the blasted snake's fangs tearing through his throat; remembers his own desperation, knowing he had not fulfilled his promise, and the sight of Lily's eyes hovering blurrily above him behind thick glasses. He does not remember making a conscious choice to stay behind as his body died, only that suddenly, like the sensation of falling just as you hit sleep, he was disoriented, unreal, viewing his own body from above.

It takes him longer than perhaps it should to recognize that he is more alone than he had ever been in his life. It is one thing, he realizes, to intentionally distance oneself from others when one still has the benefit of living at a boarding school, with regular daily interactions, however impersonal, with its other residents. It is quite another when solitude is not a decision, but an immutable fact.

Thus, Severus regrets his outburst within moments, but of course by then Miss Granger is long gone and there is no possible way to pursue her, even had his pride allowed it. Her sobs have left him feeling - _feeling_ - shaky and shocked with the knowledge that somehow, somehow he was not so reviled by the living as he had thought, that he had not imagined the care she and Potter and Hagrid took with his body all those weeks earlier. His new non-body can show none of the outward symptoms of emotional upheaval that he had been accustomed to, however, and it is disconcerting, this lack of physical sensation; he imagined that his fingers ought to be trembling, his breath to be moving raggedly in and out. But there is nothing, nothing at all, nothing but too many feelings building up inside of him and with no outlet until it all became too much and he opened his mouth and it all came out in a scream. A purging.

He floats now beside the window, impotent and insubstantial.

* * *

Hermione doesn't tell Harry and Ron about Snape's ghost, but it's a near thing. For months, really, after he chased her out of the shack she finds herself thinking about him at odd times, like when she is meant to be studying for the NEWTs she will - _will,_ dammit - be sitting in only a few months' time, or when she is waiting in line for her Portkey to Australia, or when she is lying sleepless in bed because her first day at her new job is starting tomorrow and she is scared witless.

She even thinks of Professor Snape after Ron takes her out to dinner on the first anniversary of the Hogwarts battle, takes her someplace quiet because she said she couldn't possibly face merriment or even one of Harry's nervous speeches at the Ministry 'do, clasps her hands in his big square ones across the table and asks her, looking endearingly half-cocky, half-terrified, to marry him. And then, after he has slipped the modest ring over her knuckle and she has smiled until she feels her face might crack with the force of it, Hermione blinks and sees, of all things, Snape's ghost in the millisecond between closing her eyes and opening them again, sees the bleakness of his expression, the defeated slump of his body. She blinks again, but the image remains in her mind's eye. Why? _Why?_ Ron is tracing the lines of her palm, saying something, smiling, but she can't hear him.

Hermione has trouble sleeping that night, plagued by thoughts of Snape alone in the cold, empty shack, by the contrast between her relatively happy life and his miserable after-death. She sits up with a cup of tea long after she would normally be asleep and wonders whether ghosts sleep, and if they dream, and what they do all day. She has research to do.

At last, she crawls into bed beside Ron, snoring softly into his pillow. He barely shifts when she tucks herself up close behind him, throwing an arm over his ribs and a leg over his hip, trying to claim some of his warmth, trying to stop her body's shaking.

* * *

Severus spends a great deal of time attempting to breathe. When he had a body he never appreciated it, did not understand the fundamental glory of physicality. His own body, unlovely and unloved, was more bother than anything with its propensity for accumulating dirt and its demands for sustenance and release.

Now he misses his body, misses touching things, manipulating objects. He longs to hold a fork and knife, to taste even something as mundane as porridge. He is desperate to feel beetle eyes slipping against the pads of his fingers; the powdery softness of dried broom moss; the weight of a moonstone settled heavily in the hollow of his palm. His entire bodiless being now passes through walls as though they, and not he, are not there. Severus aches inwardly to make contact, to feel something, _anything_ solid beneath his hands or feet. He wishes fervently that when next he floats upwards to the shack's dingy upstairs, his head will impact the ceiling with a fatal thump.

But strangely, strangely, most of all he misses the sensation of air moving in and out through his nostrils, the brief fullness in his chest when his lungs filled completely. The inability to inhale so much as the smallest breath leaves him feeling wrong in some fundamental way.

He opens his mouth wide, wide, wide, almost expecting to feel a protesting crack from the hinges of his jaw, trying to gulp in a yawn; but his chest remains hollow.

* * *

Most of the time, Ron doesn't mind when Hermione spends her days off work at the Ministry library. It gives him the chance to play games of pick-up Quidditch with his mates or sit around their flat watching bad telly with no nagging wife to push his smelly feet off the coffee table or ask him not to leave crumbs all over the counter when he makes himself a sandwich. And besides, he understands, or thinks he does, the importance her research has to her. Hermione feels knots of guilt in her stomach whenever he asks her, as he always does when she gets home, "Had a breakthrough today then, love?", but she makes herself smile and shake her head. Besides, she _does_ always do a little research into memory charms, though the futility of the effort makes it hard to drag air into her lungs, sometimes. So she's not _really_ lying to Ron.

And anyway, she gave her word she wouldn't tell anyone about Snape, and she can't think of any other plausible explanation to give Ron if she were to confess she spends her days off learning everything she can about ghosts. It shouldn't feel so… illicit, this research, but it does. She has piles of notes that she keeps stashed among her work things where she knows he'll never stumble across them.

* * *

There are thirty-three floorboards in the shack's downstairs room. Some days, Severus spends hours studying the grain of the wood, finger hovering above knots and whorls as though he can actually feel them. His favorite board has a crack in it that looks, if he squints, rather like a downturned mouth, above which are two small knots like lopsided eyes. The board's grain flows downward from the crack, and sometimes Severus fancies it is Dumbledore's face above the fall of his ridiculous beard, Dumbledore trapped here in this hell with him.

"This is your fault, you bastard," he hisses. Dumbledore-in-the-floorboard looks back at him with maddening impassivity, just as the man himself had done in life.

* * *

He counts the days out loud with each sunrise, repeating the morning's number five times in order to cement it in his head until the morrow.

He'd like to scratch tick marks into the walls, neat little rows of groups of five, but he can't grip anything, he can't _mark_ anything. His fingernails are insubstantial as air. He longs to smash, to _crush,_ to feel something shatter under his hands. Instead, he screams and screams, an enraged, agonized wailing that, in his more lucid moments, Severus supposes must be doing wonders for the shack's haunted reputation.

* * *

He can venture outside, but only for a radius of ten or so feet. He hovers above the grass and looks up at the sky, and he can see Hogsmeade in the distance, a jumble of rooftops. In the beginning he tried daily to break through whatever it was that held him here, but it was futile; there is no physical barrier, at least not one that he can feel. He simply cannot move beyond a certain point.

The shack itself is a place of nightmares. Mostly, he is able to ignore his surroundings, though it takes a great deal of concentration to simply _not see_ the way the walls and floors and furniture are scored with claw marks; to forget standing at the end of a tunnel, squinting, uncomprehending, at the dark, canine form before him. To not remember the sour taste of fear; to not see, each time he exited the shack, that same dark shape looming above him, imagine its breath against his face. To always keep his eyes resolutely away from the dark brown stain on the floorboards and never remember the hot, unstoppable pulse of his blood and memories leaving his body.

Sometimes, he can see people walking about, little dark specks. He can't remember a time when he didn't want to keep away from people.

* * *

One day, Severus loses count. He opens his mouth to say the day's number and all that comes out is a strangled sort of noise. His eyes widen and he imagines he can feel his heart thumping madly in his chest, and he opens his mouth again, determined not to panic, and says in a voice that is grimly clear, "Three years, eight months, three weeks and…"

He must stop, because he cannot remember the number of days. He has no idea. Four days? Five? He casts his mind back frantically, uselessly.

He drifts through the wall, stares blankly at the distant hills, burnished gently gold by the rising sun, and feels a great fear fill him as it hits him, with the force of a thousand rounds of _Cruciatus,_ that he is here forever and marking time was never going to change that, anyway.

* * *

Ginny talks Ron and Hermione into going to Hogwarts for a memorial dedication.

"It would mean a lot to Harry if you two were there," she says in a hissed whisper one morning over brunch at Grimmauld Place. Harry is upstairs, changing James' nappy. "I know you hate these things, I know they're hard but - please. He had so much to do with this one-"

Ron looks at Hermione, eyebrows raised. He hasn't fought her in the past when she said she wouldn't, _couldn't _ go to any of the events memorializing the war, despite the fact that he is the one whose brother numbers among the dead. It's all so ghastly, the politicians and their overblown speeches - she reads the articles that come out the next day, scowls at the moving photographs capturing insincere smiles and Harry, always Harry, looking uncomfortable and out of place but determined. Harry has gone to every single event in the last six years, but he has never been involved in planning one before. The Hogwarts memorial is different, she knows.

Harry returns, little James cradled against his shoulder. Hermione smiles at her friend; he looks tired and happy and all at once, it feels selfish to say no this time, yet again. So she says yes.

* * *

"If I had a hatchet," Severus tells Dumbledore-in-the-floorboard one day; then he pauses. He cocks his head at the floor, lips twisted. "If I had a hatchet," he begins again, "and the ability to wield it, I would use it to chop off your ridiculous beard." He closes his eyes, imagines the heavy waves of white hair folding in upon themselves, dropping silently to the ground. Then he looks down again.

"And then," he says, "I would take the hatchet and bury it between your eyes."

* * *

Hermione Granger returns one day while Severus is busy _(Ha!)_ mentally plaiting the strands of soft, long grass that covers the hillside on which the shack stands. It is an exercise in which he has indulged more and more often of late, whenever he feels as though he might be going a touch mad, as though his mind is trying to escape into the ether and he might be able to tether it to this dreary place along with the rest of him by focussing very firmly.

He is drawn from his focus by a flicker of movement at the edges of his vision, a flicker which sends the twisted strands of grass he had been so deliberately constructing to unraveling inside his head. Turning his head, Severus sees a figure making its way up the hill from Hogsmeade, a small figure with enormous hair and a determined stride. Severus stares for a moment, finding it difficult to believe that he is seeing what, or rather who, he thinks he is seeing, and then, in a flash of pure panic, he disappears.

Severus discovered very early in his new existence that in addition to floating and slipping without effort through walls and ceilings, he can blur and fade into the background whenever he does not wish to be seen. It was, he found, surprisingly easy to navigate the world in his new, incorporeal form, rather as though the ability to move about while hovering seven inches off the floor was somehow innate. Had he given the matter any thought while he was still alive, Severus would have assumed that ghosts had to learn to exist as ghosts much as children needed to learn to walk and talk and write and harness their magic. In any event, he has had very few opportunities to put his new skills into practice.

He watches, wishing he had the ability to take deep breaths because when he was alive that was the _only_ bloody thing that kept him reasonably calm in the face of danger, as Hermione Granger makes her way to the top of the hill and stands gazing pensively at the shack, shielding her eyes with one hand against the sun. She looks older - _How much older, how much?_ - with small lines about her eyes and something in the way she walks, the way she's dressed, that says _woman_ rather than _girl._ He watches as she goes into the shack and calls his name, looking tentative; follows behind her and looks on as she opens the beaded handbag dangling from her wrist and removes an impossible number of books (_Undetectable Extension Charm,_ he thinks automatically) and explains, in a too-loud voice, turning in a small circle in the center of the room as she speaks, why she brought them and how to use them and says she will return to collect them and hopes he is actually still here. "Or not," she says then, and shakes her head, looking… lost for a moment. "Or not," she repeats, more firmly this time; "I don't know if you'd prefer to be here or… not… so. Yes, well."

Severus floats backward, slowly, as she exits the shack, still without seeing him, and Apparates away. He waits for several minutes to make sure she is not coming back. Then, scarcely allowing himself to believe they are real, drifts into the shack and stares at the books she laid out in a semi-circle. His eyes flit from one cover to the next - books on Potions, predictably enough, but there is also fiction, and Ancient Runes, and Muggle philosophy.

If Severus had a body, it would be shaking as he finally gathers the courage to whisper the title of the first book, and then, "Page one."

Author:MillieJoan 


	2. Part 2

_Disclaimer: Not mine. _

* * *

When Hermione returns to the Shrieking Shack, she half-expects the books she left there to be undisturbed. She half-hopes they will be undisturbed. It might mean that Professor Snape is gone, that he found a way to free himself from his ghostly existence. If anyone could do it, she thinks nonsensically, it is Professor Snape; and then she would be free as well, free of the weird sense of responsibility that has weighed her down for years, now.

But when she pushes open the shack's door, her breath catches in her throat for the books are most definitely _not_ undisturbed, in fact they are _utterly_ disturbed. They are lying as she left them, but each and every one is open and the pages of one are fluttering madly, directed by the muttered words of the transparent figure suspended in a crouched position inches above it.

"Professor Snape," she whispers, and he visibly startles, shoulders jerking and head whipping around to look at her. Hermione thinks of all the times he snuck up behind them when they were students, appearing silently over their shoulders while they brewed, stepping out of darkened alcoves to catch them mischief-making in the halls, and how funny it should be now that it is she who has startled him; but of course it isn't funny, not really.

"Are you enjoying the books, then?" she asks, for want of anything more intelligent to say. Her voice is a squeak.

He stares at her for a long moment, his mouth half-open, then says, "Yes," so quietly Hermione can barely hear him.

"I'm glad," she says. "I didn't really know what you'd like so I just… I bet you've read some of them before, but the Lowell was published after your…" She trails off, twisting her fingers together and feeling unbelievably stupid.

"I noticed," he says, and then, "How long… precisely... has it been?"

"Oh," Hermione says. There is a pleading edge to Snape's words that cuts into her soft tissue. "Six years… nearly seven." She feels ashamed, suddenly, and rushes to say, "I'm very sorry I didn't come back sooner, sir. I just…"

Snape blinks away a sort of winded expression. "I believe I was rather forceful in telling you _not_ to return," he says.

"Yes, well. I had a lot of practice disobeying you when we were at Hogwarts, Professor. I should have kept up the habit a little longer."

He snorts, and she looks at him, surprised. There is something odd about the way he is holding himself, a stiff uncertainty. His eyes hold a touch of mania that makes Hermione nervous, but he is also, obviously, amused, which is shocking enough to put just about everything else out of her head.

"So, why are you here now?" he asks. "And why… this?" A vague wave of one hand in the direction of the books spread across the floor.

Why, indeed? "I… went back to Hogwarts recently," Hermione says. She isn't entirely sure where to look; it is difficult to focus on his face, when the ghastly wound on his neck is so close that her eyes are drawn to it against her will. She finds herself staring instead at his feet, shimmery in their thick-soled boots. "It was a memorial dedication. A marble wall with the names of the dead enclosing the western courtyard."

She risks a glance at Snape's face. He sees her glance and raises one brow, and Hermione nearly starts crying; she hated, _hated_ that raised brow when she was his student, for it often preceded a particularly nasty comment and indicated quite clearly that the person on whom he gazed was an utter idiot. But seeing it now, all she feels is a profound sense of loss. She looks away.

"R-right," she says. _Get to the point, Hermione._ "It's just - there are a lot of ghosts at Hogwarts."

"Really?" Snape says, and Hermione doesn't have to look at him to know he is smirking. "I hadn't noticed."

"No, I mean - there are a _lot_ of ghosts now. After the battle… Well, I suppose many were not prepared to - die." She blinks against the image of Colin Creevy's spectre waving wanly at her as he drifted past her in the entrance hall.

She looks up at Snape and forces herself to hold his gaze. "There are a lot of them," she says, "and it's awful and sad and - and everything you'd imagine. But I thought, at least - at least there are a _lot_ of them." She lifts her hands, gesturing at the empty, desolate room around them. Snape's eyes widen, just the slightest bit.

"Ah," he says; the sound is choked, and there is something - something - in his dark eyes that makes Hermione glad she came, even if she is so late. For it is something, despite all her research, that she had not considered before - what happened to ghosts whose corporeal bodies died in remote places. At Hogwarts, at least the ghosts have each other and other living people with whom to interact. Snape has been trapped - imprisoned, essentially - alone for years, with no one to talk to and nothing to do. It is a wonder he hasn't run mad. (_Can_ ghosts run mad? her brain insists on asking, and she tells it quite firmly to shut up).

"So you thought I must be… lonesome," Snape says now, drawing the last word out as though it is distasteful. "And you believed - what, precisely? That your company would be preferable to being alone?"

That something is still there, an uncertainty at the corners of his eyes and the twitch of his fingers. It makes Hermione feel suddenly bold. "Isn't it, sir?" she asks.

The Snape she had once known would have castigated her for the audacity of her question. But she Snape she had once known was alive, and living, however unwillingly, amongst other people; no matter how misanthropic he always appeared, no one can be entirely right without some basic human contact. Snape's ghost is, she can see all at once, truly more transparent than his former self, in every sense of the word. His emotions play across his face in a way that her professor's rarely had.

After a brief struggle, his mouth working in silent fury, Snape says, "Perhaps." The two syllables are bitten off and spat out; Hermione can practically feel his humiliation.

"Well… good. Because I think being alone forever sounds rather horrible, and if I can do anything to help, I'd like to."

She feels her own humiliation rise when he barks a bitter-sounding laugh in response. God, why does she have to sound so _prissy?_ She blushes.

Snape gives her an absolutely withering look. "And the books?" he asks.

Hermione shrugs, feeling more awkward by the second. "I figured… well, I can't imagine being unable to…" She shakes her head. "I thought you must be terribly bored."

Snape is very still, watching her. Hermione thinks about everything she has read over the past few years. _The life, if it can be called such, of a ghost is one of frustration._ That line, from Sandusky's _The Left Behind,_ has echoed in her head again and again.

"I would be," she adds.

* * *

He ought to thank her. That's what people do, isn't it, when others have done them a kindness, but Severus cannot make himself speak the words. Instead he manages, "Bored… does not begin to describe it," and wonders if this girl, this young woman, can possibly imagine the hours, the days, the bloody _years, six_ of them, apparently, with nothing to do and no one to talk to and the impression that his mind is atrophying; no, worse - that it is crumbling to bits, all the reasonable, intelligent, relatively good parts drifting away like so much dust leaving in their wake the dark and ugly parts of him, the insane parts that he always suspected might be lurking somewhere.

And then this - this _woman_ came and left these books behind her and he felt… it was a mad rush, a frenzy, as though he had been starving and was suddenly sat before a Hogwarts feast. It was hard - is still hard, really - to believe the evidence provided by his own eyes. She took the time not only to choose books she thought he might like, but to Charm them to open at his voice, to turn their pages at his command. She considered him; whatever else she has been doing with herself for the past six years, _she considered him_. It is impossible to comprehend.

He drops his eyes from her face. Takes in her sensible robes, flat shoes. Her hair is pulled away from her face, held off her neck by a clip. Severus cannot surmise anything about her life from the way she presents herself; she could be anyone. A teacher, a reporter, a small businesswoman. A potioneer, even.

"What is it you have been doing with yourself, then?" he wants to say, but doesn't, feeling wrong-footed, rather as he felt when he was a young man and still attempting to join or strike up conversations. He remembers that certain expression, the one on the faces of his fellow students or Death Eaters or colleagues. _What, it talks?_ the expression said, and, with a raised eyebrow and a dismissive flick of the eyes, _Why is it talking to us, do you suppose?_ His mouth turns down in a grimace; he loathes this part of himself.

Granger is gathering the books he's already finished into her arms. A strand of hair has escaped the dubious confines of the clip and drifted into her eyes; she hefts the books against her hip with her right arm and swipes impatiently at the hair with her left. A glint catches Severus' eye, but before he can ask the obvious question she has shifted the stack of books again so that it is cradled in both arms. She smiles at him, tentatively.

"I'll bring more next week, then," she says, and though her voice does not rise at the end of the sentence Severus sees the question in the uncertain set of her brows. He feels his own brows come together incredulously. She thinks he might not allow her back.

"That would be… appreciated," he says.

"Anything you'd like in particular? I don't know that I'll be able to find anything too archaic, I've got a lot of meetings and… family things, but I can do my best with anything else."

He shakes his head, watching her. She's here, she's really here. She's coming back. "No," he says slowly. "Whatever you find is fine."

She nods and smiles, the corners of her mouth turning up a bit more firmly. "Good," she says. "Well… good-bye, sir."

Severus nods. He suddenly feels incapable of speech, or rather, he feels as though what might come out of his mouth would likely be humiliating, along the lines of, _Don't leave me._

He is still trying to hold back the words when she Apparates away.

* * *

"It's really quite interesting," Hermione tells Ron over breakfast the following week. "The social structure of merpeople is different from ours in so many ways. It's actually more like that of goblins, if you can believe it, with a strong matriarchal-"

Ron sets his coffee mug down on the table with a little more force than necessary. He looks irritated. "It's six-thirty in the morning," he says, and to Hermione's ears his even tone is obviously forced. "Can't you give it a rest just-just for a _bit?"_

Hermione feels hot from her sternum to the crown of her head. She wraps her hands around her own mug and blinks down into it. She knows Ron isn't exactly enthralled by the details of her work, and he's not really at his best in the mornings anyway, constantly griping about his captain's penchant for early practices, but… Well. It's just as well, then, that she promised Professor Snape she would not reveal his continued existence to anyone; Ron would be bored silly if she tried to talk to him about the fascinating 'lives' of ghosts.

"Sorry," she mutters.

Ron looks uncomfortable; he generally knows when he's being a bit of an arse. He shakes his head and crams a bite of toast into his mouth, then says around it, " 's okay, love."

Hermione wrinkles her nose. "That's repulsive, you know," she says, and can't decide whether she wants to chuckle or sigh when he gives an agreeable nod.

* * *

The Cannons are playing in Ireland over the weekend, so Hermione has the house to herself. She cleans on Friday night, muttering to herself as she sends Ron's socks, rancid from spending hours in his disgusting trainers during practices and matches, flying toward the hamper from all corners of the house. She is not much of a housekeeper herself (whenever Molly is coming over, she and Ron always engage in a mildly panicked flurry of cleaning, often resorting to Muggle methods as neither of their household charms are really up to snuff), but at least she doesn't leave her dirty laundry scattered everywhere, thank you very much.

She spends Saturday alternately working on yet another draft of the centaur legislation her boss has promised to take a look at, and making a list of books she thinks Professor Snape might enjoy. Her memories of his office at school are not only of gruesome, pickled things in jars, but also of the haphazard rows of dusty books those jars propped up, but she had never been in his office long enough to look closely at the titles. The books she had chosen last time were a hodge-podge from her own collection; she had simply hoped that at least some of them would truly interest Snape, and figured, rather guiltily, that he must be bored enough to read the others anyway.

_So._ Hermione taps the end of her quill against her chin in thought. Snape has probably read any and all relevant potions books that had already been published when he was alive, but she can check Flourish and Blotts to see what has been written since his death. And perhaps periodicals, as well; those come out far more frequently than books, and while they are not lengthy enough to last Snape very long they would probably at least be interesting. And other disciplines as well - she can bring an assortment of books that have come out in the last six years, both magical and Muggle, and then she can ask him more specifically next time which subjects interest him most. Perhaps some fiction as well… detective stories? Those would be not only entertaining, but would give Snape's great mind something to solve. Hermione's mouth curls into a faint smile as her quill scratches at the parchment, a neat bulleted list appearing in its wake.

* * *

Hermione returns to the shack during her lunch hour the following week to find Snape hovering by the window as though he has been waiting for her. She smiles uncertainly at him as she unpacks a new stack of books from her handbag and arranges them, like the others, around the room, but, unsurprisingly, he does not return the smile.

"Are you finished with the old books, or shall I leave some of them?" she asks finally, at a loss as to what else to say.

Snape shakes his head slowly. "I'm finished," he says. His voice is hoarse, as though he has scarcely used it since Hermione saw him last.

"Okay." A few waves of her wand send the old books sailing, shrunken, into her bag. She looks up at Snape, fiddles with the handbag's delicate straps. "I suppose… I'll let you get to it, then," she says.

Something twitches in Snape's expression, and then he is looking at her with a combination of defiance and desperation in his face. Hermione presses her lips together, wondering, and after a moment she dares to say, "Or - well, I've got a sandwich in my… would you… mind very much if I ate it here? Only, lunch is so dreary anyway in the Ministry cafeteria…"

The excuse sounds flimsy even to her own ears - what on earth could be drearier, after all, than eating lunch in an abandoned shack with a dead man? - and Snape gives her a long, measuring stare before saying, "As you will."

"All right then." Hermione looks around the room, grimaces at the state of it, then gingerly picks a spot on the floor, settles down with her back against the wall, and takes a sandwich out of her bag. It is only when she has partially unwrapped the wax paper that she realizes her faux pax, and looks up at Snape with a horrified expression.

"Professor, I'm so sorry! I wasn't thinking - here, I'll just - I'll put it away -"

Snape, who has drifted over to examine one of the books, head cocked to one side at an angle that fully exposed the wound on his neck, glances at her, brows raised. "Pardon me?"

"The - my sandwich," Hermione says. Stupid, how could she be so _stupid?_ How could she have overlooked something so basic after all the research she's done -

If anything, Snape's brows climb higher into his hairline. "Your sandwich," he repeats.

"Yes," Hermione says, but she is beginning to feel uncertain. Isn't it insensitive to eat in front of ghosts? "I'm sorry, it was very rude of me…"

It takes her a moment to recognize the look on Snape's face as one of amusement. "Rude of you to eat," he says.

_I will not be embarrassed for trying to be kind,_ Hermione thinks firmly. She says, "Sir Nicholas was always offended when we talked about food around him."

"Sir Nicholas is an idiot," Snape says.

Hermione's mouth twitches. "Oh."

Snape's thin lips stretch into the smallest smile Hermione has ever seen before he glances back down at his book again. She takes a bite of sandwich and chews slowly, watching him. He doesn't seem to really be reading, she realizes after a few minutes, his eyes skittering across a line or two before flicking around the room in an agitated fashion, resting everywhere, seemingly, except on her, so she is startled when he says, apparently speaking to a crack in the window, "So. You are employed by the Ministry then, Miss Granger?" Then, with a sudden, pointed glance at her left hand he sneers, "Or should I say, Mrs. Weasley?"

"It's Ms. Granger," Hermione says, taken aback. And then, though he certainly has not asked for an explanation, she adds, "My parents got… lost, after the war. I didn't want… I wanted them to be able to find me easily if they ever came back, so I kept my name."

Snape looks at her. "Lost…?"

Hermione shifts, glancing away from him. "I modified their memories and sent them to Australia after Sixth Year, before Harry and Ron and I went into hiding. Then, when everything was over…" She will _not_ cry, she will not. It has been more than six years. She will not cry.

"When everything was over," she repeats after several seconds, "I went to Australia to look for them. I wasn't sure… I think I could have restored their memories, but I was afraid…" She hitches a shoulder, cutting a look at Snape from under her fringe. He looks back at her, the crease between his brows cutting deeply. "Well, it was a moot point anyway. I couldn't find them. I have… no idea where they are, or even if they're still alive."

"Ah." Snape looks uncomfortable, but he doesn't offer any false apologies, for which Hermione is absurdly grateful. That is, until he adds, "You know the chances of their memories returning properly on their own are slim to none."

Her lips tighten. "Quite aware of that," she says. "Thank you."

* * *

Severus is frantic for nearly the entirety of the following week, certain Granger will not be returning. Once again, he thinks bitterly, he has managed to drive away the only person who wants to help him. He feels despair twist at insides that are no longer there, and he clenches his eyes shut against the image of Lily, young and lovely and hurt by his angry words. Thoughts of Lily have cropped up with exhausting regularity since his death, rather as though it is she who is doing the haunting, but they are still pale things compared to the bright, hot thoughts he carried with him constantly when he was alive. They ache rather than sting.

But this, this is like reliving the worst parts of his life. Granger's kindness is as inexplicable as Lily's friendship was, and now it, too, is likely gone for good. Alone again, and again, it is all his own bloody fault.

* * *

Severus is as near a state of sleep as he seems able to achieve in his incorporeal form, a sort of don't-give-a-fuck catatonia. He has been hovering horizontally above the mattress in the upstairs bedroom, staring up at the ceiling where a long, faded watermark has begun to blur before his unfocussed eyes.

A call from downstairs startles him out of his stupor. "Professor? Professor Snape? Are you here?"

It's her. Severus blinks to clear his vision and sinks through the mattress, through the floor, before he can muster so much as a single coherent thought.

Granger looks startled by his sudden appearance, but she recovers quickly. "I brought you more books," she says, not meeting Severus' eyes. "I got some from the library… how are you enjoying the detective stories?"

Severus shakes his head. "Ah… very much," he hazards, because he assumes he will enjoy them when he finally reads them. Believing that Granger would not be coming back, he has read very little this week, trying to ration reading material that might, after all, have to last him for eternity. But he does not tell her this.

"Good," she says, "because I brought some more." She straightens and shoves her hands in her pockets, looking uncomfortable.

Severus feels a ridiculous sort of terror. "Thank you," he manages, and then, before his nerve vanishes - pathetic, pathetic! - "You never did tell me what you are doing working for the Ministry."

* * *

Snape's unexpected question is delivered in a rush that gives the impression he has run a gauntlet, and his face, full of contradictory lines that make him appear both hesitant and fearsome, makes it apparent that he has come out the other side uncertain whether or not he has triumphed. Expressing interest in others' lives is a matter of basic politeness but Snape makes it look like something frightening. He is, Hermione realizes, quite hopeless when it comes to simple human interactions.

It takes a moment for her to get her voice to work properly. "Um, well, I'm working at the bottom-of-the-bottom in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures," she says, adding, "It's a dreadful name, of course."

She pauses then for a moment to let him respond. He doesn't, and she has to take a deep breath before continuing, feeling as though she is giving an oral report to a particularly disinterested audience.

"'Regulation and _Control,'_ for heaven's sake. It's barbaric; these are sentient beings just like we are but there's this whole 'magic is might' mentality that doesn't even make _sense,_ you know, as they're magical, too - it says it in the bloody name! Which ought to be the first thing to go, I think. After all, if people hear I work for, say, the Department for Equality for all Magical Creatures, it sets a _very_ different tone as far as the work the department does than -"

_"All_ magical creatures?"

Caught off-guard by the interruption, Hermione's next words catch in her throat, resulting in an unattractive gurgle. "Pardon, sir?"

"You cannot possibly mean to say all magical creatures ought to be equal according to Wizarding society," Snape says.

Hermione eyes him. "Well… yes."

He examines the wisps of his fingernails. "Flobberworms?"

She feels a flush creep up her neck. "Self-aware magical creatures, then."

That bloody eyebrow. "Dementors?" And then, before she can even begin to formulate a response: "You're wasting your time in the Ministry, anyway. It is a bureaucracy, rife with corruption. There is no point in discussing it further."

Well, then.

* * *

Granger comes to the shack at least once a week after that, generally during her lunch hour, though once or twice she arrives in the evening or at the weekend, explaining, at Severus' inquiring look, that _Ron_ has a late practice or is out of town for a match. It seems Mr. Weasley has not grown up since Severus saw him last, that he still thinks tossing Quaffles around is the best way he can make a contribution to society.

Then again, Severus thinks disparagingly, he is probably right, at that.

Some days they sit silently but for the occasional murmured renewal of Granger's Warming Charms - the shack is, Severus understands from the way she shivers, damp and chilly - until Granger says, exasperated, that they must have _some_ conversation, that it is bizarre beyond reason to sit silently like this while Severus floats tight-lipped above her.

Other days, like today, she simply begins talking the moment she walks into the shack and seems incapable of stopping. Severus wonders if perhaps she is as starved for conversation as he is, and though the thought troubles him he still prefers these days, when he has only to answer her questions rather than struggle for something to say himself, to the stilted quiet of the others.

Today she asks whether ghosts feel the passage of time as humans do; and if they feel like the same people they were when they were alive; and how far from the shack itself Severus is able to roam. "I have research to do," she says when she stands, brushing dust from her trousers. She leaves wearing an air of distraction, mumbling to herself about the longevity of cleaning charms.

* * *

Hermione returns to the shack the following week, armed with Mrs. Weasley's well-worn book of household spells. It is the sort of magic that Hermione has always secretly disdained, but as she aims her wand at the bloodstained floorboards and watches the rusty color leech away, she feels ashamed of her own snobbishness. It is useful work, she supposes as she looks around her, the keeping of a tidy home. It does wonders for one's mental state.

Snape has said nothing since she arrived beyond an incredulous, "What in blazes do you think you're about?" when she breezed past him through the door, threw off her cloak, rolled up her sleeves, and began divesting the corners of their cobwebs with vicious, satisfying flicks of her wand. Now, he floats down from the corner in which he had been perching, watching her work through narrowed eyes, and looks about him at the walls, scrubbed clean of dirt, the tattered wallpaper mended; the floor, scoured and polished; the curtains, cleaned and pinned back from the windows, which are free of grime, their cracked panes repaired. There is much more light, now, streaming through the clear glass in the spaces between the boards, reflecting off the snow outside. The room is - almost - cheerful.

"Better, sir?" Hermione says. She feels unaccountably nervous, as though she has handed him a potion that she _knows_ she brewed perfectly, but which he is sure to find lacking in some way.

There is a moment of silence, and then Snape says, "Perhaps." And then, more quietly, "A great deal better."

She cannot stop the grin that stretches her mouth, but she does manage to keep her tone relatively even when she says, "You're very welcome, sir."

* * *

Severus has given up trying to mark the passage of time. Though it would be easier these days, what with Granger's visits giving structure to his otherwise formless existence, he finds that he no longer cares about time in the long-term sense. It is enough to know, when she walks in the door again, that at least a few days have passed, and that in another few days she will walk through the door again.

* * *

And then something happens that forces him to begin counting days again: Granger doesn't come for, as best he can tell, nearly four weeks. Severus runs out of books with which to distract himself, her latest offerings lying dusty where she left them, and his thoughts dart between fear that something has happened to her and dread of the empty days and weeks and years stretching endlessly before him. His helplessness is shameful, and mortifying, though it ought not to have been unexpected. What a fool he is, not to have noticed the creeping dependency.

When she returns at last, she looks pale and too thin, with hollows below her cheekbones that shouldn't be there, and she is walking very carefully, picking her way with unusual slowness across the dewey ground. Severus watches her from the window, his non-existent heart setting up its phantom pounding in the hollow space where it once lay, and is determined that she will not know how much her absence frightened him.

"Are you quite all right?" he asks the moment she steps foot in the shack. She turns to look at him, squinting slightly, and Severus realizes it must be difficult to see him with sunlight streaming through his form. He drifts away from the window.

"I-yes," she says. "Thanks for asking." He presses the point, though self-preservation is screaming at him to shut up, shut _up,_ man, for the love of Merlin -

"You are not injured?" Her movements up the hill were too deliberate, nothing like her usual impatient strides.

"Nooo," she says, and pauses, looking faintly embarrassed. "I've been… sick, I guess. I'm sorry I couldn't get a message to you, I thought you wouldn't want me to tell anyone else you were here and of course owls can't deliver letters to ghosts."

Severus closes his eyes, then opens them again. "I am… pleased that your illness has passed."

"For the time being, at least," she mutters, and then sighs. "I might as well tell you - you'll find out soon enough anyway, seeing as you're merely dead, not blind." She squares her narrow shoulders. "I'm - I'm pregnant. I've had horrible morning sickness - I couldn't even go in to work."

"You can't be pregnant," Severus says. "You're far too young." He wants to yank the words back the moment they escape this lips - they are irrelevant, not to mention absurd. Granger huffs a laugh.

"I'm not a student any longer, Professor," she says. "Haven't been for years, in fact."

If ghosts could blush, Severus would be covered, head to toe. "Quite," he says, voice clipped with embarrassment. He eyes her. She must be several years older than Lily… was… when she married James Potter and bore his child.

"Indeed," he says, and makes a noise as though he is clearing his throat of a non-existent blockage. "In which case, I believe congratulations are in order."

He hopes his voice does not sound as dubious to her ears as it does to his own.

* * *

Visiting Snape becomes more and more arduous as Hermione's pregnancy progresses, Apparition being unsafe for expectant women. Ron, too, becomes more attentive to her whereabouts, worrying about her in a way that is at once touching and irritating, as though pregnancy has stripped her of all capability in his eyes. She takes to seeing Snape on Sunday mornings, when Ron is generally still sleeping off the effects of too much alcohol after a Saturday night spent either celebrating or commiserating with his teammates, depending on how the afternoon's match had gone. She leaves Ron a note that is she out walking or running errands, gathers her latest offerings for Snape into her beaded handbag, and Floos to the Hog's Head, making her increasingly slow and uncomfortable way from there up to the Shrieking Shack.

Hermione is tired all the time, it seems, and it shows in her reflection, which she has taken to avoiding whenever possible. The morning sickness ended with the first trimester, thank goodness, but between work - she is determined not to give her supervisor any reason to think pregnancy, or indeed motherhood, will lessen Hermione's devotion to her job - and trying to keep the house at least somewhat livable despite Ron's best efforts, and keeping up with Harry and Ginny and the rest of the Weasleys, and the baby's rolls and jabs and her own bitter fear keeping her from sleeping… Well, she is tired. All the time.

She has considered cutting back on her visits with Snape, but finds the thought distressing. She doesn't know what he does when she isn't there, beyond reading the books she leaves for him. When he was her teacher she never considered him having feelings, really, but now his loneliness is palpable. And of course, she - along with the rest of Wizarding Britain, thanks to Harry's efforts to champion Snape's memory, not that she will ever tell Snape about that - knows about Lily Potter. Knows that he is - was - is - a person capable of friendship, and heartbreak, and love. And besides, weird as it is, Hermione would miss Snape if she didn't come see him. She knows this for certain, because she was surprised by how much she missed him for those few weeks when she was laid up in bed with a bowl strategically ready at her elbow.

* * *

On the Sunday before Christmas, Hermione hefts Snape's gift into her arms and Floos to Hogsmeade. It is snowing, but only a little, delicate flakes brushing her cheeks and mostly melting when they land on the ground, making the path to the shack slightly slick. Hermione navigates it with care, and has to shift the package so that she is supporting it against her belly while she opens the shack's front door.

Snape is waiting for her, as is usual these days, his hands clasped behind his back. He surges toward her when he sees her burden, hands held out as though he means to take it from her; then he obviously recollects himself and a look akin to self-loathing crosses his face, and Hermione finds herself wanting nothing more than to reach out and smooth it away.

"Happy Christmas!" she says, forcefully cheerful, and bends at the knees to set the package on the floor.

"Is it Christmas?" Snape says, and then, "Is that for…" He shakes his head so hard it looks like he is trying to shake some unwanted thought away.

"You," Hermione says.

Snape's expression would be funny - mouth slack, eyes bulging - were it not for his obvious stupefaction. "I," he says, and makes a choked sound. He doesn't say anything else.

"Oh," she says, and blinks for a moment, her eyes aching, before injecting cheer into her voice once more. "Well then, let me open it for you!" She wrapped the package last night in the same striped paper in which she wrapped Ron and Harry's and the rest of the Weasleys' presents, feeling a little silly as she knew Snape could not open it himself but wanting _some_ element of surprise. She uses her wand to slit the Spell-o-tape and gently peels away the paper.

* * *

It's a phonograph, of the Wizarding variety.

"See," Granger says with her customary enthusiasm while Severus floats beside her, staring, "here, I've got records…" She pulls them from her handbag and enlarges them with a flick of her wand.

"I didn't think I ought to shrink the player, it seemed a bit too delicate," she explains as she stacks the records one above the other. There are a lot of them, both Wizarding and Muggle; Severus recognizes Mozart and The Beatles, as well as The Unforgivables, a magical band that was popular when Severus was a student. Granger does something complicated with her wand and the records levitate upwards to hover above the phonograph.

"Next record," she says, and the lowest record in the stack drops into place. She proceeds to demonstrate the commands for getting a record to play, turning it over, and returning it to the top of the stack so the next record can have its turn.

"I know Latin's traditional for incantations, but I just didn't have time to come up with the proper translations," she says, almost apologetically. She looks up at Severus from her position crouched on the floor in front of the phonograph; the pose emphasizes the bulge of her belly where it rests against her thighs, and Severus looks away, embarrassed.

"Is it all right?" she asks, and the vulnerability in her voice forces him to look back at her, bewildered and appalled. "It was rather like the books, I wasn't sure of your taste in music so I included a bit of… well, not everything, but a lot."

"I like… a lot," he says, and does not have time to begin cursing himself for how stupid he sounds before her smile, wide and brilliant, wipes all other thoughts from his head.

* * *

One day, she can't help it. The weight of the baby is pressing upward against her lungs; her back aches and it is barely eight o'clock. The night before she had been kept awake by the irritating, intermittent tightening of Braxton-Hicks contractions. _Stress_, the healer said when Hermione complained about them. _Avoid stress, and drink plenty of water._

She is consuming water by the liter, but the other directive is harder to obey.

She says, "I'm terrified I'm going to be a bad mother."

Snape gives her a long, measuring look, and says nothing, which Hermione decides to take as an invitation to continue, even if he probably didn't mean it that way.

"I get caught up in my work. I'm selfish - Ron's always complaining about it, and I know he's right in some ways, but at least he's a grown man and can… But a baby. A baby can't understand that if I forget to make dinner, it's just because I got lost in my book and not because I don't _care."_ She presses her palms to her belly. "And even though Ron pretends he's stupid in the kitchen, he _can_ make himself a sandwich if he's hungry, but a baby _can't."_ She takes one hand off her belly and holds it flat against her sternum, struggling to calm her panicked breathing.

Snape is quiet for so long that Hermione starts to wonder if perhaps he has drifted away. She can't look at him, can't bear to see the derisive expression she is certain waits for her on his face.

Then he says, "That you are aware of this… potential shortcoming bodes well for your overcoming it." He lifts a hand, lets it hang oddly in mid-air for a moment, then drops it back down to his side. "As a student, you were diligent to a fault. Apply that diligence to the task of motherhood and I've no doubt your fears will prove to be unfounded."

Hermione has heaved her bulk up off the floor and taken a step toward him before she remembers that ghosts cannot be hugged.

* * *

They have discussed the fact that Hermione will be unlikely to be able to come to the shack for a time after the baby's birth. It was a strange, surreal conversation; Snape looked unhappy, but unsurprised, and Hermione tried not to feel guilty, leaving as many books behind with him as the shack's floor would hold, lined up one directly beside another.

"Good luck," he said, awkward and strangely sweet, just before she descended the hill to the village.

She worries about him in the days leading up to labor, when she has little to do but think and time her frustratingly infrequent contractions. And then the intensity of the birth and its aftermath make her forget everything else for awhile, everything but Rose, sweet, exhausting, demanding Rose.

* * *

Severus keeps music playing almost constantly, relishing the sound in the otherwise silent shack, and sometimes when his own thoughts become too clamorous he barks the command to raise the volume until the swell of music drowns out anything else that might fill his head.

He thinks too much, these days, rationing his reading material in case Granger takes longer to return than they both expected. Severus has had little reason to think about childbirth in the past but knows, in an academic sort of way, that the process and subsequent recovery can, for some women, be arduous. He tries not to think that perhaps she might not return at all - either by choice or because, as he understands, sometimes childbirth can go dreadfully wrong.

He also tries not to think about what will become of him if - no, when, for whether she succumbs today or tomorrow or one hundred years from now, Granger is, without a doubt, going to die and leave him someday - Granger doesn't come back. Immortality is not something Severus ever aspired to - it was, in fact, one of the Dark Lord's hang-ups that he found quite ridiculous - and it is disturbing to think he may have achieved it without meaning to. His panic threatens to envelop him, and he tells the music to play even more loudly.

It is an almost welcome distraction when the first group of Hogwarts students comes upon the shack during a Hogsmeade weekend. They send snowballs thumping against the windows, slush sliding down the panes, and dare one another to get closer. Feeling reckless, he amuses himself by making ghostly noises, when one is bold enough to touch the doorknob.

* * *

She returns when the snow is just beginning to melt. Severus is vaguely aware of the pop of Apparition above the gentle undulations of Johann Pachelbel's _Canon in D_, a song he dismissed in life for its ubiquity but which, in death, he finds himself turning to more and more often because it reminds him, in as physical a way as he is capable of being reminded these days, of the rhythm of the human heartbeat. For a moment, he thinks the students are back; then the door opens and she is standing there in shapeless robes and her cloak around her shoulders and someone very small cradled in a sling against her chest.

"Hello," she says, and smiles a little.

"Hello," Severus says, and then, "Is that…?"

Granger's lips twitch a bit, perhaps at the obviousness of the question, but she steps forward, turning so that Severus can see a round little face below a fluff of reddish hair.

"Her name is Rose," Granger says, unasked. She is swaying gently where she stands. "Isn't she gorgeous?" Then she laughs quietly, flicking an embarrassed glance up to Severus' face and down again. "Sorry. I used to hate it when new parents asked me that because new babies usually _aren't."_

Severus cannot say with any honesty that the baby, who is sleeping with one miniscule fist curled alongside its - her - chin, is very attractive, but for a moment she makes him imagine he feels breathless, in the old human way he remembers.

* * *

Hermione has always been good at juggling her many projects, but finds that motherhood is something else altogether. Rose cannot be juggled; Rose refuses to be taken care of on a convenient schedule. Yet Hermione has discovered that Snape was right - her fears about motherhood have not become reality, largely because Hermione had not counted on just how consuming thoughts of Rose would be. Mrs. Weasley has assured her that the intensity will lessen as Rose grows and gains independence - "Though it will not, of course, ever be quite gone, dear, depend upon that. She'll never be too far from your mind."

It does become more difficult to visit Snape, however, once she returns to work. She spends her lunch hours at the Burrow, now, nursing Rose and letting Mrs. Weasley feed her nourishing meals because she's generally too knackered by the end of the day to manage to put together anything much for dinner, and Ron's efforts, while filling, are rarely nutritious. And then Ron is making an effort to be home more, only staying at the pub for a single pint after matches, so he is up at a decent hour the next morning. Hermione finds herself both touched by his obvious devotion to Rose - no matter how annoyed Hermione is with him, something loosens inside of her whenever she comes upon him rocking their daughter, singing the nonsensical, Wizarding lullabies that Mrs. Weasley must once have sung to him - and resentful that she has been reduced to quick Apparations to the Shrieking Shack after work once a week or so. The resentment simmers around the base of her skull, making her restless and snappish, and then she feels guilty because what sort of wife is she to wish her husband would spend _more_ time away from his family?

She only stays at the shack for five or ten minutes at a time, time enough to give Snape some new books and music and have a brief chat that mostly consists of her prattling on in a rushed sort of way and him giving monosyllabic responses. She stopped asking how Snape's week was after he snapped at her, once, that "Nothing bloody _happens_ to me, Granger!" in a tone that is both embarrassed and slightly self-pitying.

She is irritated with Snape, too, sometimes, irritated by his clear helplessness when, in life, that was the last word she would ever have associated with him. It is exhausting, this charade, trying to fit him into her life, which already feels full to bursting with work and Rose and Ron and, occasionally, sleep, and there are times that she wishes he wasn't so dependent on her. And then she feels, yet again, horribly guilty because - well, what else is he going to do? What else can she do? She can't leave him alone there, she _can't._

Hermione's last thought most nights before she tumbles to sleep is that things _will_ get easier, eventually. They must.

* * *

Granger comes to see him one morning, appearing unexpectedly outside the window through which Severus had been gazing blankly. She stumbles a bit on the landing of her Apparition, as if she is drunk or very tired, and shakes her head, looking frustrated, before knocking briefly and entering.

Severus watches, bemused, as she stomps into the room and settles with her back against the wall. She is clutching a thermos full of something that steams gently, and she closes her eyes when she sips from it.

"What day is today?" Severus asks at length, and Hermione looks at him.

"Saturday," Granger says. She closes her eyes and takes another sip from her thermos. "Ron's at a match near Edinburgh. I dropped Rose at Harry and Ginny's for a bit; you'd think they'd have their hands full enough as it is but they offered and…" She trails off.

Severus cocks his head. "What, pray tell, have the Potters got their hands full of?"

She sighs. "Well, James of course," she says, and Severus suppresses a disgusted noise at the mention of Potter's unimaginatively-named offspring. "And Ginny's pregnant again, and Harry's been run off his feet lately at the Auror office." She sips again. "But they don't seem overwhelmed at all. They were more than happy to take Rose." This last is said with far more bitterness than the words themselves seem to warrant, and Severus raises an eyebrow.

Granger sees the gesture and pulls a face. "All right, yes, _I'm_ overwhelmed," she says.

"I hadn't noticed."

"Har-har." Another sip, lashes sweeping the shadows under her eyes. There is a moment of silence, not uncomfortable but unusual for her, and Severus wonders what he is meant to say. She hasn't even brought any books - she was here only two days before, after all, and it has been… a long while, it seems, since she has visited twice in one week. It seems strange to him, that she has come here, of all places, when she is in such a mood, and without the excuse of books between them.

"Why do you think you're still here?" she asks abruptly without opening her eyes. Severus freezes, stares at her.

"I… beg your pardon?" "I'm sorry," she says. "I'm sure it's a rude question, and you don't have to answer, obviously, but I've wondered since I first saw you and I can't… I can't work it out." Her eyes do open then, but she focuses them on Severus' feet rather than his face. "All the research I've done, well, it suggests unfinished business and I thought at first that maybe Harry… But you know, now, that Harry's alive, that you succeeded, and yet you're still…" She shrugs. The gesture is apologetic, but her eyes are bright and focused.

For a moment, Severus is surprised to realize that he is not offended by her words. But he senses, somehow, that she does not actually wish him gone. Hers is a curiosity of the frustrated intellectual sort, tinged, he suspects uncomfortably, with a genuine concern for him.

"I don't have an answer," he says after a pause. "It is a question that has plagued me greatly."

"Harry said… Harry said he had a choice. When he died. Whether to come back or - go on." She sounds nervous, as she often does on the rare occasions she brings up Potter's name to him.

Severus tips his head back and gazes at the ceiling. "Yes. Well. As with so many other things associated with Mr. Potter, his death was… _special."_ He feels his mouth twist and looks back at Hermione. "I did not have a choice about dying," he says.

She looks flustered. "I'm sorry, I -"

"However," Severus interrupts her, "I believe I did have a choice to either 'go on,' as you put it, or return to this plane as I am now." His lips purse as he considers how to explain to her something that he, after years of turning it over in his mind, has only begun to comprehend, himself. "It… was not a conscious decision, you understand, and it was made in an instant. There was no time to consider all the repercussions either way."

He remembers dimly, as though recalling a long-ago dream, sensing that he was approaching something, hurtling toward it really, not the proverbial white light of Muggle lore but something he couldn't quite grasp with his senses, something vast and warm and terrifying. And he remembers recoiling from it, struggling, until he came to himself again in the shack, looking down at his empty body and feeling a phantom nausea that he did not have the physical ability to expel.

Granger is silent, watching him. Her face is still, but her fingers twist together.

"I have thought about this a great deal," Severus says. He longs to take in a deep breath, but settles instead for closing his eyes for a moment. Then he says, "I don't suppose there is any chance that Potter did not tell you about my… history with his mother?"

"Ah, no," Granger says. "No chance, that is." She looks… cagey, Severus thinks. For just a minute, but long enough to make him wonder what she isn't saying.

"Right. Well. I never thought otherwise." _I never thought better of the selfish brat._ "In that case, I expect you understand why I might have been… less than eager to see Lily again, thinking, as I did at the time, that I had only just sent her son to his own death." He is grateful that he did not stumble over Lily's name; it slipped out as easily as any other word.

"Okay." Granger frowns. "But… well, I mean, again - now you know Harry's alive. He's fine. Thriving, even, for goodness' sake. So…"

"I. Don't. _Know,_ do I?" Severus says between teeth that ache to be properly gritted. He swishes around in mid-air, the closest he can come to pacing these days. "Do you really think that if I'd sussed out a way to get out of this - this - _hellhole,_ I wouldn't have taken it?" He whirls again and looms over her, carefully avoiding the creeping realization that even knowing Potter's fate thus far, he has no desire to meet Lily again - has no desire to meet with anyone again, really, for there are none among the dead with whom he could with any honesty have claimed friendship. "Why are you asking this _now,_ anyway? After - after all this time?"

She looks stung for a moment. "I watched you die," she says finally, and her voice is brittle as ancient parchment. Severus looks at her, at the way her hair curls madly in the humid air, at her shapeless robes and the pouches of exhaustion under her eyes, and doesn't know what to say in response. So:

"I know," he says.

Granger holds his gaze, as still as if motion might make her shatter, and when she speaks her lips hardly move at all.

"I'm so sorry," she says.

Severus shakes his head very slowly.

"Not your fault."

* * *

"Caldiff rejected my proposal for the pixie legislation again," Hermione says the moment Ron gets home from practice. She is stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce, Rose perched on her hip, the offending legislation scattered across the kitchen table. "I don't know what to do. He refused to even read it, and I spent weeks researching and tromping about in the woods trying to find some bloody pixies to interview -"

"You could let me get all the way through the door before bombarding me with this, love," Ron says. He stoops to peck Rose's cheek.

"Yeah, sorry, sorry." Hermione stirs the pot a little too hard and sauce splatters across the stovetop. "It's just so frustrating - Davies and MacDougal have their half-arsed ideas approved all the time, but anything that's thoroughly researched he doesn't have time for -" She cuts herself off, seeing the look of patiently-suppressed irritation on Ron's face. "Sorry," she says again. "Anyway, how was your day?"

* * *

She brings the proposal with her the next time she visits Snape, along with a framed print she found in a jumble shop in Diagon Alley, a torn-out page from an old text with botanical drawings of Potions ingredients native to the North of England. The frame is cheap and warped, but the print is in good condition, the drawings precise and clearly labeled. She hangs it near the staircase, where there is good light from the window.

"I thought the place could do with a bit of cheer," she says, and the corners of Snape's lips twitch as he studies the illustrations.

"Indeed. It is… an accurate depiction."

Hermione smiles. "I thought so, too." Unconsciously, she glances down at the bunch of parchment in her hands, and Snape raises one brow expectantly.

"And what is that?"

"Oh," she says, feeling all at once awkward. "It's a proposal I drafted for work. My boss won't even look at it - says it's too wordy and convoluted." Her fingers clench around the parchments. "He's a bit of an idiot. Or at least lazy."

"Most people are," Snape says mildly. "Though I do recall your essays being a bit more… involved than was actually called for. Tangential, even." The eyebrow again, accompanied by an amused tilt to one side of his mouth.

Hermione feels herself flush. She has all but forgotten Snape-the-teacher and how she despised him for his pettiness and the way he dismissed her questions and the extra effort she put into her assignments. The reminder is unwelcome.

"What's so wrong with expanding upon a topic?" she demands, her voice more shrill than she meant it to be.

Snape chuckles darkly. "Become a teacher, and you'll understand." At her irritated look, he says, "It takes a great deal of time to mark essays, even when one's students keep to the required length. That is in addition, of course, to actually teaching classes, patrolling the corridors, administering detentions, and creating lessons plans." He crosses his arms in front of his chest. "I used to _dread_ your essays, Granger. They took at least three times longer to grade properly than any of your classmates'."

Hermione feels tears of humiliation spring to her eyes. "Fine. Well. That's… Yeah." She shakes her head. "I just - I get so interested in a topic, and then everything seems so important." She lifts her chin defiantly. "Details _are_ important. They add nuance and - and - balance, I guess. How can the Wizengamot make an informed decision regarding the destruction of pixie habitat without understanding the reasons behind the pixies' choice to live in specific areas?"

"And no doubt the history of each race of pixies from Cornwall to the Isle of Skye," Snape says dryly. "Granger… it isn't that details are unimportant. It is that there is a time and place for them." A pause, and then he says, "If you've the time and inclination, I could give you pointers from the point of view of a burnt-out marker of papers." There is a sardonic twist to his lips, and he spreads his hands wide. "I am, I find, quite at my leisure."

* * *

When Granger bursts into the shack one afternoon with a triumphant grin stretched across her face, Severus cannot help but smile back, bewildered though he is. And when she announces that her boss has agreed to put her proposed legislation before the Wizengamot during their next session, he finds that his smile grows wider, a feeling like satisfaction settling into the empty space inside his chest.

* * *

It isn't really cheating, of course. Hermione finds this thought flitting through her mind more and more frequently of late. It crops up at the most inconvenient times: when she is meeting with a goblin liaison for work; when she and Molly are sitting in the Burrow's kitchen, drinking tea and watching Rose play on the floor with Ginny's old dolls; when Ron half-wakes in the night to her restless movements and stills her with an arm thrown heavily across her middle, his fingers stroking her side with sleepy, fumbling gentleness. The solidity of him beside her reassures Hermione. There is nothing solid - nothing physical, that is - about Snape's presence in her life, after all. So no, it isn't really cheating.

But the guilt is wearing, sometimes, nevertheless. It's stupid, really; mostly, she is able to justify her deception by reminding herself of her promise to Snape to never tell anyone about him. And Ron is not always the most discreet person, particularly after a few pints with his Quidditch mates, some of whom were Snape's students. So really, she has no choice but to keep quiet. Usually she can get away with simply not mentioning where she spends her lunch hour - why would Ron need to know that, anyway, under normal circumstances? - but once in awhile she is forced to fib a bit, make vague references to her research, and then it all feels… wrong. Odd. Necessary, but odd.

* * *

Time passes with a blurred fluidity. Granger is nearly gleeful when she informs him, one afternoon, that Potter has named his newborn son, in part, after Severus, who is vociferous in his condemnation of the "Savior's" stupidity. The unfortunate child's other namesake holds his peace, smugly, from his floorboard.

"The idiot has named his son after two madmen," Severus says, disgusted.

"You're not mad," Granger says.

"Am I not? I was certainly tending in that direction." A pause. "Until… you."

She has no reply to that bit of inarticulation, though the tip of her left ear, visible through the hair she has tucked around it, glows rather pink.

Her own second child is born several years after the first, and Severus endures, once again, her long absence after the boy's birth. She brings him with her, as she did her daughter when she was first born, and Severus sees with a jolt of something strange and possessive that the baby bears none of his sister's resemblance to the Weasley clan. His head is covered with a close cap of brown curls, and his mouth is shaped precisely like his mother's.

* * *

_ A/N: I was completely remiss in the last chapter in not sending out a huge thank-you to my beta, Ivy Amelia, for her help with this story. She took time out of her very busy schedule to look it over, even though this is not the story she signed on to edit!_

The last part should be posted sometime next week. 


	3. Part 3

_Disclaimer: Not mine, per usual. _

* * *

__

A/N: This is the last part of the story. I truly hope you all enjoy it, and thank you, so much, to everyone who has reviewed and sent messages.

Thank you, once again, to my wonderful beta, Ivy Amelia. 

* * *

"Confidentially," Hermione's boss says, leaning across his desk toward her and lowering his voice, "it was between you and Davies for the job. But you've won out, Ms. Granger -" He pauses when Hermione lets out a tiny breath, waits a moment for her to compose herself, to stop the beaming smile she can feel taking over her entire face. "- You've won out. I've been very impressed by your work the last year or so. You've always had a strong work ethic, but your proposals have been top-notch lately. Very impressive stuff." He nods at the door, grimacing slightly. "If you'd send Davies in after you, I would appreciate it."

Hermione struggles to arrange her face into an expression of modesty. "Of course, sir." She closes the door behind her and glances at the clock. Five minutes until it's an acceptable time to go home for the day, and for once she's going to leave on time.

Her first thought, then, is that she has to tell Snape.

_No._ She stops with her hands poised above her beaded handbag and stares for several long seconds at nothing. No, not Snape. She has to tell _Ron._ She has to go _home_ and tell _Ron._

Her excitement oozes, it feels, through the soles of her shoes, leaving puddles in her wake as she walks down the corridor to the Atrium Floos. It was only all the help Snape has been giving her, she thinks, that made her thoughts jump to him rather than Ron, the hours he has spent tetchily forcing her to cut extraneous words or paragraphs - or, once, six entire pages - from her work. That's all.

She nods to herself as she tosses a pinch of powder into one of the enormous Atrium fireplaces.

At home, Ron is cradling Hugo against his shoulder and listening to Rose chatter lispingly about her day. Hermione Vanishes the ash she has brought with her through the Floo and holds out her arms as Rose twirls around to face her, crying, "Mummy!"

"Oof," Hermione says, catching her daughter against her chest. She buries her face in Rose's frizz of red hair, inhaling the slightly-sour smell of a small child who needs a bath. "Hello, love," she whispers.

"Hello, Mummy," Rose whispers back, smiling as she always does at their ritual. Hermione smiles back and hoists her into her arms, standing and looking at Ron.

"How was your day?" he asks, carrying Hugo over so she can kiss him.

"Good," she says, and finds her excitement returning. "In fact… it was very good, really."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She grins. "You're looking at the new Head for the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures!"

"Yeah?" Ron says again. "That's great. About time, though, I'd say."

His response strikes Hermione as a bit lukewarm. "Well, it's not like I could become Head before Caldiff decided to retire," she says, somewhat sharply.

Ron raises his eyebrows. If he wasn't holding Hugo, Hermione imagines he would be holding up in hands in a gesture of surrender. She can remember him when they were students, his palms raised and pointed toward her. He would strive for a conciliatory expression, but she could always read the, _"She's a bit mental, isn't she?"_ in his eyes.

And maybe she is, at that.

"Ugh," she says, and shifts Rose on her hip. "I just… well, I wasn't sure I'd get it, after all, so I was pretty thrilled."

Ron shakes his head at her. "Of course you got it," he said. "You're Hermione. You're brilliant."

The words are so very sweet, and they make Hermione ache deep under her sternum. Ron thinks she was promoted on sheer brilliance. Ron has no idea how much hard work over the years - and lately, how much help - secured this promotion. It's such a large part of her life - the largest, outside Rose and Hugo - and he has no idea. And it's her own fault, mostly, but also his, and she smooths Rose's hair and tries to smile at Ron because, after all, he thinks he has given her a compliment.

* * *

At odd moments, Severus finds himself remembering the strangest things about his body. He had a cluster of small brown birthmarks over his left ribs, and silky white lines on the outer edges of his thighs from his sudden growth spurt at age fifteen. He used to wake to crusty bits at the corners of his eyes. He thinks there is a good chance that his toenails were in need of clipping when he died, but he cannot be certain.

Groups of schoolchildren continue to plague him periodically, but Severus does not want to run the risk of baiting them too often, instead remaining out of sight, blending into the wallpaper when they throw stones at the windows or, very rarely, dare to venture into the shack itself, their footsteps hesitant, their bodies jerking each time they make a floorboard creak. They note the books on the floor without apparent interest and do not seem to mark the lack of dust at all, and Severus is, for once, grateful for the relative stupidity of the average student.

Once, to his discomfiture, a pair of teenagers enters, looking furtively over their shoulders and then around the shack itself before they press their mouths together and swallow one another's nervous giggles, twining together like Devil's Snare atop the boy's cloak. Severus watches them, lip curled despite the starbursts of envy going off where his insides once lay. When the boy slips a hand under the girl's skirt, it occurs to Severus that it might be imprudent to allow them to finish their tryst uninterrupted - he doesn't want hoards of randy Hogwarts students realizing the Shrieking Shack is a good place for a bit of privacy - and he drifts through the pair on the floor, whose eyes are closed, their fingers tugging frantically at each other's clothing. He lingers just long enough to cause some serious discomfort, then whooshes up through the ceiling. From below, he hears the girl shriek, the boy shout, "What the hell?"

Cautiously, Severus sinks back through the floor and hovers against the ceiling, blending in with the cracked plaster. The students have scrambled upright; the boy is grabbing for his cloak, the girl pulling down her skirt, her eyes darting around the room. They pass over Severus, unseeing.

"Maybe this place really is haunted," she says, shivering.

"Maybe." The boy grabs her wrist. "C'mon, let's go."

* * *

If anyone with a modicum of intelligence ever did enter the shack, Severus thinks a few years later, there is no way the place could be mistaken for uninhabited. He looks around at the changes Granger has wrought over the years. The books are now organized on a set of second-hand shelves and Charmed to remove themselves a certain distance, drop, and fall open when he reads their titles. They took her a tremendous amount of time to Charm; Severus felt useless, watching her work, her forehead wrinkled in concentration, useless and ashamed of his former self. He truly hadn't allowed himself to recognize her strengths when she was his student, or acknowledge how hard she was willing to work.

She has placed candles in the wall sconces and Charmed them to ignite at dusk each evening so Severus can continue reading if he wishes. They illuminate the armchair with its sagging cushion that she brought one day in her ridiculous handbag. When Severus made a snide remark about how useful such an object would be to him, she said archly, _"Some_ of us, you know, have actually been aging. As much as I've enjoyed sitting on the floor over the years, my back has started complaining after our visits."

For the first time, Severus notices the subtle changes in Granger's appearance since that first day she discovered him, the way her face looks softer somehow around the edges. There are, he realizes, a few strands of silver in her hair. He wonders how many of the changes are truly the result of getting older, and how many are premature, brought about by the war and having to grow up too fast.

Until now, he has marked the passage of time in the larger sense - the years, rather than marking each week by her visits - by watching her children change and grow in the photographs Granger occasionally brings for him to see. Rose is now all legs and sharp elbows, a Weasley in every way, including her lanky body type, except for her hair, which, though red, has her mother's hair's tendency toward frizz. Hugo is rounder, softer, and still looks like a miniature Granger with his dark hair and brown eyes and the deep cleft in his chin, apparent even below cheeks that still retain their baby fat. He is not entirely sure of their ages, or Granger's. He wonders how many years before she catches him up in age and experience; how many years before she exceeds him.

* * *

Hermione brings Snape the latest edition of _The Potioneer_ one morning, slipping out of the house before dawn, leaving a note on the kitchen table and Ron still snoring quietly in their bed. It is a Saturday, the first such in years that she has left the house to see Snape. She will Apparate to that wonderful new bakery in Hogsmeade and bring pastries home with her as a treat for breakfast, cavities be damned; she'll probably be back before Ron and the children are even awake.

Snape is reading by candlelight when she arrives at the shack. In the darkness, he looks more other-worldly than she has seen him for some time. She hangs back for a moment in the doorway, looking at him, at the way his long fingers hover above the book, tracing the line of text he is reading; at the fall of his bright-dark hair over his shoulder, hiding the ghastly wound on his neck; at his back, curved in the hunched-over posture of a lifelong academic.

When Snape has finished the paragraph he is reading, he turns his head and looks at Hermione over his shoulder. She smiles. Of course he knew she was there.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asks, straightening. If he had a proper body, Hermione thinks, he would have been rolling his shoulders, twisting his neck to get the kinks out.

She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. What comes out is the untempered truth, though she hadn't known she was about to be honest until she started talking.

"Ron and I had a row last night," she says, fidgeting; she rarely talks about Ron, or at least, she rarely talks about her relationship with Ron. "Rose is going off to school soon, and I thought - well, Salem has a wonderful magical arts program, far better than anything Hogwarts or the schools on the Continent can offer, and Rose is very gifted. But Ron… he can't see her, can't see anyone, really, going that far away."

Snape makes a derisive noise, but doesn't otherwise speak. Hermione shakes her head.

"He's not being - that is, I think it's because of Fred, though I'm not sure Ron even knows why he's so angry about this. But ever since the war, the Weasleys have all kind of stuck close together. Even Charlie moved back to England. I think he's afraid to have her so far, but, but it's different for me, being Muggle-born. With Portkeys and Apparition and - well, I won't see Rose for a good part of the year as it is, no matter which school she attends; with magical means of transportation, nothing seems very far away to me, anymore. But Ron doesn't see it that way."

"Mmm," Snape says. "So, you argued and then - you felt the need to come here, this morning?"

"We more hissed at each other under the covers so the children wouldn't hear us than _argued,"_ Hermione says, with a pained little smile. "But… yeah." She shrugs. It has been awhile since she has felt the need to explain, even in her own mind, her propensity for feeling at ease here in the shack, with Snape.

Snape flicks a glance at her, lips twisted wryly. Hermione blinks; she has the sensation that he knows exactly what she is thinking, feeling, without her having to spell it out.

* * *

Granger's expression flickers into something pained.

"What is it?" Severus asks.

"We're always going to have the same arguments," she says in a rush, and Severus does not need to ask to know she is talking about herself and Weasley. "Over and over again. For the rest… for the rest of our lives." She sits down upon the floor, ignoring the armchair completely, pulls her knees into her chest and wraps her arms around her calves. Her chin rests upon her knees, her abundant hair falling forward on either side of her face so that Severus cannot make out her expression. He is silent, hovering beside her, waiting for her to continue.

She makes a damp sort of sound, halfway between amusement and despair. "It's not as if he's abusive or running around on me. There's no good reason for me to… And he does love me, I know he does, and he's a good father. A wonderful father, really. But it's exhausting. Even more so now that the kids are getting old enough to understand us; I just keep - keep everything in now, you know? I don't want them to hear us fighting."

Severus makes an involuntary noise and Granger looks up at him. Her eyes go a bit wide at the corners, and he wonders what it is she is seeing in his face. Her own is dry and tired. He looks away, at the dust motes dancing in the light, and remembers, viscerally, the fear, the anguish of listening to his parents arguing, his mother's shrieks, his father's fist banging on the table to emphasize a point. Remembers curling into a fetal position in the corner, hugging his own elbows, waiting for them to stop and feeling, deep down, that somehow their brokenness was his fault.

"That is a good instinct," he says, his voice rough. From the corner of his eye, Severus sees her sit up straighter, crane her head to see his expression. She opens her mouth to speak but he talks over her.

"And yet," he says, and now he looks into her eyes, "it will do them no good to learn from you to keep silent when they have something they want to talk about, either."

Granger eyes fill and she glances away. "I know that."

Severus nods. He still imagines he has insides, and they are coiling themselves into knots of anxiety and mortification. He is unused to discussing anything personal, anything… intimate. The question he wants to ask feels audacious, the answer something he has no right to know.

"I do - I love him, really," Granger blurts, and Severus stares at her, wondering when she became a Legilimens and how she was able to perform Legilimency on him, a ghost. Her cheeks are flushed with embarrassment, but her eyes are defiant. "I really do. It's just… it's not… It's not what I think it should be. We've been through so much together, he and I and, well, and Harry, of course, and I don't think there could ever be a time when I _wouldn't_ love him, wouldn't care what happened to him, but just now… It's not…" She takes in a deep breath, and Severus' phantom lungs ache. "We don't share what I thought I would with a husband, I suppose."

Severus hardly knows what to say; his mouth opens and closes several times without any sound emerging, and he looks away from her. Despite _knowing_ that he cannot actually sense such things, he feels as though the air around them is hot and somehow stretched. When he gathers the courage to look back at her, she has settled more comfortably against the wall and is gazing, with an expression of faint embarrassment, at her shoes.

* * *

Rose goes off to Hogwarts, and then, soon after, Hugo follows her, and the house seems very quiet. Ron gives Hermione a buff on the cheek in the mornings, clutching a cup of coffee in one hand and a slice of toast in the other and watching while she dashes about gathering her scattered things on her way out the door to work. He is coaching these days, a minor team with bleak prospects from Aberdeen; he is aggressively cheerful and self-effacing, despite Harry's recent promotion to second-in-command in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, which, Hermione thinks, makes a nice change from their school days when Ron was sullen and moody whenever Harry was in the limelight and he, himself, was not.

The children's letters from school are filled with chatter about essays and exams, friends and Quidditch. There is not a single mention of monsters lurking in the pipes or trolls let loose in the bathrooms, and Hermione relaxes fractionally with each breezy missive she receives. She carefully does not allow herself to remember too clearly that _her_ letters home never mentioned such things, either.

She reads their letters aloud to Ron, and when their eyes meet in shared mirth over something Hugo has written, or in fond exasperation over Rose's tendency toward the dramatic, Hermione can almost call herself contented.

* * *

There is, of course, a party at the Burrow when Rose graduates, and Ron gets spectacularly drunk, drunker than Hermione has seen him in years. She Apparates him home at the end of the night to sleep it off, pawning Hugo off on Harry and Ginny. It takes a great deal of effort to coax Ron into his pajamas, and once he has finally tumbled to sleep Hermione curls up on her side facing him. He is snoring in his usual open-mouthed and messy fashion. His hair is getting too long, she thinks, looking at the way it is starting to curl around his ears; though not nearly so long as Snape's, and the thought makes her blink too fast. She presses the tips of her fingers against her lips and closes her eyes.

Ron's body is nearly as familiar to Hermione as her own: She knows the starburst pattern of the freckles on his upper back, the softness of his stomach, the high arches of his feet. She knows how his breath smells when he kisses her good-night (like the peppermint toothpaste she has been using since childhood), and how it smells when he kisses her good-morning (sweet-and-sour, like rotting vegetables). She knows the bluntness of his fingers and the curve of his arse and the way his body hair has become somehow softer with age, fluffing up as it has faded from wiry auburn to something that looks sun-bleached.

She will never, _ever_ know Snape's body the way she knows Ron's. The thought - the _realization_ - is far more painful than it should be, and God, it shouldn't be a realization at all, just a fact, an obvious, bare, mundane _fact_. She is a married woman, she has _children,_ and it should not be a surprise that she will not be becoming as intimately acquainted with another man's body as she is with her husband's. And then she pushes her fingers harder against her mouth to stifle the hysterical bubble of laughter she feels suddenly looming, because Snape's incorporeality rather trumps her marriage as the most practical reason she will never know him intimately. She swallows hard several times then turns over, very carefully so as not to disturb Ron, determined to go to sleep.

Behind her closed lids swim images of Snape as she remembers him in life: All bones and pale face and stringy dark hair. She wonders whether the skin of his chest was even paler than that of his face; whether he had dark hair on his arms or legs or stomach. She puts the palm of her hand against her own stomach, which is soft, the skin folding these days in a dozen new and creative ways; draws her hand up to cup one breast, gently marked by silver lines and less full than it used to be. Ron has never remarked on the changes time and childbirth have wrought on her body, and Hermione finds herself wondering what Snape would think, if he were to see her.

She is still lying there, wide awake and restless, several hours later, when she decides that perhaps a walk would be just the thing to quiet her mind.

* * *

Severus has been looking at the sky for what must be several hours, tracing patterns in the stars. Some are patterns he remembers vaguely from his Astronomy classes; some he invents, or thinks he does, at least, on the spot. He was, at best, a desultory scholar of the stars when he was a student, preferring to pour his mental energy into other topics that truly interested him. And ever since Albus… well, he avoided the Astronomy Tower during that dreadful year as Headmaster, unable to face the ramparts and the vast, dark empty sky beyond them.

But now, squinting upwards, he wishes he had a fuller knowledge of what he is seeing. The cosmos seem more interesting now he has eternity to observe them. Perhaps he can ask Granger to bring him some books on the subject.

At that moment, as though Conjured by Severus' thoughts, Granger pops into existence a few paces away.

"Hello," she says, tucking stray hair behind her ears. She looks odd; nervous. Her eyes slide away from Severus'.

"Hello," he says. He wonders what she could be doing here at such an odd hour; though watching her shift from one foot to the other, he finds he doesn't particularly care, as long as there is nothing terribly wrong. He gestures to the ground beside him. "Would you care to join me?"

Granger gives him a small, pleased smile. She settles down on the grass, bracing her weight on her palms, and tips her head back to look at the sky. Severus observes her for a moment, tracing with his eyes the strong line of her jaw and the length of her neck, before deliberately turning his attention, once more, to the stars above them.

* * *

"Rose graduated today," Hermione says, breaking the silence that has stretched between them for several long moments.

Snape glances at her. "Indeed?"

"Yes." She inhales, breathing in the lovely, loamy smell of the ground in late Spring. "It's so strange. She was… she was very small, just a minute ago." "Mmm."

Hermione has shifted so she is lying on her back, mimicking Snape's own posture, hovering as close to the earth as he can manage. The grass is damp against her palms, the air pleasantly cool against her face. It feels heavenly. She hasn't been outside at this hour in more years than she cares to remember. She looks at Snape, wondering whether he is experiencing the moment in the same way she is, at all. In all these years, she has been careful about asking him questions; he is so reserved, and too many of the things she wants to understand feel like invasions of his privacy. But now, in the Otherworld that is the hours between midnight and dawn, she is daring.

"Can you feel things? Physical things, I mean?" she asks. She feels a strange light heartedness, entirely at odds with the hour and the dew seeping through her robes. And the dour, ghostly company. She feels real, intellectual excitement, so much so that she forgets all dignity and rolls over onto her stomach in the grass, the better to see him. He is very still, on his back, the dark-brightness of his hair spread out just above the ground, his hands crossed together over his stomach. Hermione kicks her heels lightly in the air, a childish, uncoordinated dance against the stars.

Snape seems to stiffen further. "Not as such," he says. He unfolds his hands, runs the fingers of one through the grass at his side. They pass through as though the blades aren't there at all. "There is. . . an awareness, of things. An imprinted memory, perhaps, of how they ought to feel. Rather like a phantom limb, I expect."

She raises her brows at the unspoken irony: Now he is a ghost, all the corporeal things surrounding him are phantoms.

"What about feelings? I mean, emotions?" she says without thinking. "Can you feel them? Just the same as you did when you were alive, I mean?"

Snape moves his hand, which had been sweeping through the grass between them in subtly widening arcs. One more arc and he would have been touching her; now he clasps his hands together again against his waistcoat.

"Yes," he says tersely.

* * *

One day, Severus thinks of Lily, really thinks of her, not the fleeting images of her that sometimes plague him at the oddest moments but a true, sustained, deliberate thought, for the first time in what must be years. The picture of her in his mind is fuzzy and blurred, like a very old memory. Which is, he realizes, exactly what she is to him, now.

Even now, even knowing that her son is alive and well and that he, himself did not fail quite so spectacularly as he had feared, Severus has no wish to see her again. To see anyone who awaits him beyond, really: Albus, his parents, the fucking Marauders, the fucking _Dark Lord._ And he has little doubt that none of them would be pleased to see him. Whatever it means to 'see' another person in whatever-it-is-that-exists-beyond-death. Severus has trouble believing it is anything like the Muggle idea of Heaven, with everyone making merry with one another while floating upon clouds. But he is sure the others are there, in some form or another; they are, he thinks, in large part what made him recoil from leaving this plane.

Granger's daughter's graduation shook Severus more than he would like to admit. More time has passed since the girl's birth than he realized; less time remains for him to spend with Granger. Granger, whose image in his mind is sharp and immediate and as visceral as anything can be to him these days. Granger, with her wide smile and quick mind and the bewildering enjoyment she seems to have in his company.

He cannot go on, stuck here, alone, forever. He cannot.

. . . . .

"You told me once that you had done extensive research about -" Snape waves a hand vaguely over his insubstantial form, "ghosts." He spits out the word as though it tastes bad, though of course, Hermione knows, even if words had tastes Snape wouldn't be able to experience them.

"Yes," she says, craning her neck to look at him. He is doing his pacing-thing, for want of a better word, drifting with purposeful speed to and fro across the shack.

"In your research did you ever come across evidence that a ghost can… change his mind?"

"Change his mind?"

He makes a gesture of frustration. "Go on, leave this - place."

"Oh." A strange humming suddenly fills Hermione's ears, and her heart begins thumping worryingly fast against her ribs. "Oh, I… I don't know. I don't think so. But I'll… I'll have a look again."

Snape nods, eyes half-lidded and unfocussed. "I would appreciate that," he says, and Hermione thinks she might be sick.

* * *

There is little to be found about ghosts' ability to continue on once they had already made the choice to remain behind, and Hermione finds herself feeling guiltily glad of it as she pores over one book after another with no real luck. Knowing that Snape is thinking in these terms makes her ache somewhere deep inside; it hurts to have it made so plain that their… friendship… is not enough to make him happy as he is. _Well, of course it isn't,_ she thinks. Of course it isn't - how could it be? A few books, some music, visits when she has time: None of these could possibly make up for everything he lacks. A body, for one. Company of his choosing, for another.

If she had found anything conclusive, Hermione would have felt honor-bound to tell Snape, and then - then he would leave, and the thought of continuing without him, of going to work, writing letters to the children, reading in the evenings, or knitting lumpy scarves and mittens, while Ron watches terrible telly, is unexpectedly unbearable. But she does not find anything, really; there are a very few tales of ghosts that haunted certain locations for centuries before vanishing abruptly one day, but there is no evidence that they actually went on, no way of knowing that they are not simply choosing, for whatever reason, not to interact anymore with the living. One scholar, who devoted her life to the study of ghosts, asserted that the dead must simply 'let go,' whatever the bloody hell that means, whenever they are truly ready. Hermione tells Snape as much, and his frustration is a palpable thing.

* * *

Ronald Weasley's death is very sudden. Granger Apparates to the shack one day, and Severus knows that something is dreadfully wrong; she is haggard, her eyes dry but ringed with shadows. A fall, she tells him, scarcely able to get the words out before the tears come. A Bludger to the chest while he was coaching practice, and a fall from his broom that none of the players was quick enough to stop. "Not that it would have mattered," she gasps out, "the Healers said the Bludger likely k-killed him anyway-" She swipes at her face with the palms of her hands, her rings catching the light. "He was so young. Not as young as you were, of course, but…" She squeezes her eyes shut, shoulders shaking.

Severus reaches for her, then lets his hands fall, stunned and helpless in the face of her grief. She has come to _him,_ and he cannot even put his arms around her. He aches, or imagines he does, aches in every molecule of his non-existent body as though it has been hit with the flu. The desire to touch her has never been so strong.

"I am so very sorry," he says - insipid, meaningless, _stupid_ words, but they are all he has to offer.

* * *

Life without Ron is a strange adjustment. The first year or two are hard - harder, Hermione admits only to herself, feeling sick with guilt, than she might have imagined. The house is very quiet, and too neat. The children come around to see her more often than usual, popping in at odd hours with bags of takeaway. Harry and Ginny invite her over more often as well; Harry looks as though he has aged ten years since Ron's death. He has taken it harder than any of them.

There is a sort of fog enfolding Hermione like a quilt, a defense against having to think too much. _What will you do now?_ people keep asking her, and she has no answer; if Ron hadn't died, she imagines they would have continued as they were until retirement, and then pottered about the house together in their old age, driving one another mad, for a few decades more. It hadn't been a very exciting plan, or even really a plan at all; in fact, if Hermione had allowed herself to think about it too much, she might have found the whole prospect rather bleak. But at least she wouldn't be facing it alone.

* * *

"Would you have wanted to keep teaching if you'd had the chance?" Granger asks one day, apropos of nothing. Severus raises his head from the book he is reading; she is curled in her armchair, a book of her own propped against her knees. She has been to see him more and more frequently since her husband's death. Severus had never before thought he would be grateful to Weasley for anything.

"You mean, would I have wanted to keep teaching if I'd died at Hogwarts like Binns?" Severus says dryly.

"Well - or if you hadn't died at all," Granger says, then adds, "Though I don't imagine you'd have given me the time of day, in that case, so -" She stops herself, flushing. "Not that I'm glad you died," she says quickly, "just…"

Severus laughs, laughs until his lungs, if he'd had lungs, would have been begging for air. "You're ridiculous," he says finally, but he is smiling when he says it, and is gratified when Granger smiles back. "And," he says, "I don't think you would have sought me out if I _hadn't_ died."

She tips her head with another small smile, conceding the point. Severus imagines the room has grown quite warm.

"But no," he says. "I would not have wished to go on teaching, under any circumstances. Great gods, Granger, you were my student, you know as well as anyone how I hated it."

"What would you have rather done?"

He shrugs. "Potions in some other capacity, I suppose. I never really had the chance to think about it."

"Mmm." She closes her book over her index finger, marking her place.

"Why do you ask?"

"It's just - I've gone as far as I can go in my career. Actually, I went as far as I could long ago, and I've just been… stagnating, I guess, ever since. It's not… You were right, you know, when you told me I was a fool for working for the Ministry. For every piece of good legislation I manage to get before the Wizengamot, some other idiot manages to do something to set magical beings' rights back another two hundred years or so. I've done what I can to change my department so it's working _for_ the rights of other beings rather than against them, but it feels so futile, and I didn't even - wouldn't let myself realize it until now."

Severus swallows his, _"I told you so."_ Barely.

Granger sighs. "It's just… I imagined I'd be doing so much _good._ But I haven't, not really. Everything I've done can just as easily be undone by whoever comes after me. And even the things I have managed to get passed, well, they don't mean much in the face of everything I _haven't._ We still haven't recognized the centaurs' land rights. Gnomes have been declared an _invasive species,_ for heaven's sake, just because they aren't native to England!" She lets out a humorless laugh. "'Brightest witch of her age,' indeed," she mutters.

Irritation blooms like deadly nightshade. "Then _do_ something about it!" he snaps. "You're alive, you're healthy, you have a quick mind and few responsibilities - do you have any idea what I would _do_ to be in your position?"

She looks at him, clearly startled, crimson blotches forming on her cheeks as though his words had hit her like a slap. Then she nods, one short, quick bob of her head, and leaves.

* * *

"I don't want a new career," Hermione announces the next time she goes to see Snape. It is a chilly day, and she clutches the edges of her cloak tightly against her body, both for warmth and the illusion of armor. Snape glances up at her from his position at the window; he seems to have been watching a group of vultures circling in the air a few miles away.

"All right," he says.

"But you're right." She steps closer to him, watches the way the faint sunlight filters through his body. "I am… lucky. And the woe-is-me routine… well, I'm sorry." More than sorry, she is embarrassed; that sort of self-pity isn't like her, or it didn't used to be. Snape's words had echoed in her head all night; she kept seeing her situation from his perspective, and going all prickly-hot-mortified. Ron is gone, but she is still here, and really, when did Ron have anything to do with her accomplishments, anyway? The thought brought with it its own fleeting guilt, but Hermione mentally pushed it aside, because it was _true,_ dammit; she'd loved Ron and he'd loved her, but what he _hadn't_ loved was her propensity to focus so thoroughly on her work.

So, yes: She's still here, and, as she is a witch, she is likely to be here for some time, yet. And perhaps with age has come wisdom, for she has realized that she has no desire to subject herself to anything like an apprenticeship at her time of life; she doesn't feel the need to prove her worth with test scores or praise from her instructors. She knows her own mind, and she knows what it is capable of; that's enough.

Snape waves away her apology, looking faintly discomfited. "No matter," he says.

"But it does matter." Hermione finds that she is twisting her fingers together and forces her hands to still. "I do want more… satisfaction, intellectually. And from what you said yesterday… I mean, well, like I just said, I want something interesting to wrap my brain around, and then you said…" She shrugs, and her eyes flick to Snape and she notices that his eyes are fixed on her and he is going through the motions of swallowing, though swallowing _what_ is the question; perhaps it is a leftover habit from his time among the living. Fascinating.

She gives herself a mental shake. _Focus, Hermione._

"I should have… I mean, I knew that a few books and some records weren't enough for someone like you," she says, and Snape interrupts her before she can say anything else.

"What do you - Granger, have you any idea what those things have meant to me?" His voice is hoarse. "I'd have gone mad - utterly mad - without them. I was… I could feel my brain, my _self_ starting to… dissolve, to fly apart, to… You cannot know - do not belittle what you have done for me. It is more than anyone else…" He closes his eyes, then opens them. "It is far more than I deserve."

"That's not true," she says hotly. "It _isn't."_ She flaps a hand, impatient, to keep him from responding. "And besides, that's not the _point,_ not at all - the point is that I would like to do some work, on my own time, on subjects that interest me and I wondered -" with a sideways glance at Snape "- if you would like to do it with me."

"If I - what?"

"Research. Maybe even writing papers. I want to do this for myself before my brain goes utterly rotten, but if we come up with something useful, I'd like to try to publish, or something; I want whatever I do to do some real good."

Snape frowns, more, perhaps, with confusion than anything. "Research into what, precisely?" "I have no idea." She grins and claps her hands together. "It can be anything we want! Anything at all. Even Potions, if that's what you'd like - I'd have to do the practical bits, but with you working out the theory it should be…"

Hermione trails off when she notices Snape's expression; his mouth has dropped slightly open and he is staring at her with something akin to befuddlement. "What's wrong?" she asks, suddenly uncertain.

He shakes his head, very slowly. "Nothing," he says, and there is a note of uncertainty in his voice, as well. "It is simply that I am… stunned and… honored that you wish to include me in this." He looks away from her, strangely vulnerable.

Hermione gives him what she hopes is a reassuring smile. "Who else?" she says.

* * *

Time passes very quickly then, or so it seems to Severus. Granger is at the shack more often than not when she is not at the Ministry. She sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, surrounded by books and parchments; Severus is put strongly in mind of her as a student, bent over her workbench in his classroom, hair going wild from the Potions fumes and forehead furrowed as she stirred and chopped and triple-checked her notes with a sort of mania. The hair is mostly grey now, a fact that never ceases to startle Severus when he notices it, but the energy and enthusiasm are the same, and there is something distinctly girlish about her as she chews on the end of her quill, scowling with concentration. Behind her, against one wall, is their makeshift Potions lab, flasks and cauldrons and even a very fine glass stirring rod that she presented to Severus as a gift at Christmas. _("Of course, it's as much for me as it is for you," she'd said with a cheeky smile, running the pads of her fingers over the rod's smooth, rounded surface. Severus' own fingers itched in response, or they did at least in his mind, on which the sensation of cool glass under his fingertips was deeply imprinted)._

"What about something less reactive than Ashwinder eggs?" she says now. "I mean, a chicken egg contains the protein necessary to sustain a… but no, it's not magical, that's stupid…"

Severus' lips quirk up at the corners, and he looks at her out of the corner of his eye. It took awhile, but by now he has long since grown accustomed to Granger's habit of speaking aloud to no one in particular when she is working through a puzzle.

* * *

When the first acceptance letter comes, for a paper they wrote about their experiments into Transfiguring potions, Hermione can hardly contain herself; she Apparates to the shack before the owl who delivered it has even had time to fly off, and she only realizes that perhaps she ought to have dressed herself properly when she sees Snape's amused expression. Flushed with both excitement and embarrassment, she draws her dressing gown more firmly across her body with one hand and with the other, holds the letter out so he can read it.

"They took it!" she says before he has had time to read more than the first sentence or two. "They're publishing our paper! Here - did you see where the editor calls it a 'unique and innovative approach'?"

"He does, indeed," Snape says, eyes flicking rapidly over the letter. His lips stretch into what can only be called a grin.

Hermione feels her own smile slip a little. "It should be published under both our names," she says. She reaches out a hand as though to lay it on his forearm, and shivers when her fingers pass right through him. "I wish you'd reconsider - I wish you'd let me -" "No," he says, without raising his eyes from the parchment.

* * *

"I thought I saw my parents the other day," Granger says out of the blue. It is a grey and drizzly day, rain pattering against the roof. They had both ostensibly been reading, but Severus had noticed that Granger wasn't turning any pages, her expression abstracted.

"Did you?" he says cautiously. She has rarely mentioned her parents at all over the years; Severus has sometimes wondered whether she ever stopped looking for them.

"Yeah." She closes her book. It looks as though she might be trying to smile, though she is blinking rapidly. "I was walking through Piccadilly Market - sometimes I find magical things there for hardly anything, things the Muggles must think are junk - and there was this couple ahead of me, stopped at a baker's booth. It was… it was the man's coat I noticed first. It looked like my dad's, the one he'd had for years. Green. Mum bought it for him, for his birthday, I think; she said it brought out his eyes." She sniffs, looks down at her lap. "And then the woman, she was bent over the booth, picking through the loaves, and her hair -" She breaks off and closes her eyes. "Her hair was my mum's hair. The style, the texture… and in profile, I was so sure it was her. For a moment. I was so sure."

Severus doesn't know what to say. He watches her, helpless, as she swipes at her cheeks with the backs of her hands.

"I nearly ran up to them. My heart was pounding - I actually thought I might have a heart attack. And then they turned so they were facing me and they looked nothing like my parents. Nothing at all. It was like - it was like being hit with a Stunner. I couldn't move, I couldn't - I just stood there, in people's way, and watched them walk past me. And the best part is, it wasn't until I got home that I …"

She pauses for so long that Severus says, "That you what?"

Granger looks at him. "There's a mirror in my foyer. It has - it's attached to hooks, for cloaks and hats and… things. I caught my reflection in it when I got home, while I was unwrapping my scarf, and it hit me - that couple, the one I saw - they couldn't have been more than forty-five or so. _Decades_ younger than I am. I've been…" She looks beseeching. "I thought they were my _parents,_ for heaven's sake, and the absurdity of it is they could have been my children." Another pause, and then, "It's embarrassing to admit, but I hadn't realized, until that moment, that even if they were still alive after the war, and I just couldn't find them, even if they lived out the rest of their lives as Wendell and Monica… they must have been dead now for a very long time."

"I am sorry," Severus says, and hates himself for his predictable inadequacy. He moves nearer to her, longing to touch her and knowing he cannot.

Granger looks up at him. She wears her hair tied back now, almost all the time; it is thinning at her temples, but this only makes it easier to see her eyes. The rest of her is fading, slowly; her skin growing pale and papery, her body curving inwards, her spine succumbing, finally, to the weight of many years spent hunched over books and parchment, her hair changing from the dark, almost severe grey of her middling years to a soft white that makes Severus think of dandelions gone to seed. But her eyes have not changed, still dark and sharply focused, and if Severus had breath to steal, it would be squeezed out of him by the intensity of her gaze just then. She leans forward, just a little, until her cheek is resting against his; he cannot feel her touch, but he hears her little indrawn breath at the contact, and her narrow shoulders shudder. Then she turns her head and - he thinks, but he cannot be sure because she is so very close to him and he cannot _feel_ anything, dammit, and never in all his life has he wanted something as badly as he wants, right now, to be able to feel - brushes her mouth across the ghost of his.

* * *

Ginny passes away one spring, and Lily takes Harry, whose memory has been unreliable for years now, to live with her and her family in Surrey. That winter, Hermione is unsurprised when an owl arrives bearing news of her friend's death, for Harry had seemed utterly lost without Ginny, anxious and childlike. She stands for a long time, the letter hanging limply from her hand, gazing out the window without taking in anything she is seeing.

The next day she tells Snape about Harry's death, after spending much of the night lying awake wondering whether it might be kinder to keep the news to herself. But, she thinks, he has a right to know, and she watches his face after she tells him, his eyes stunned, his mouth tight at the corners. He is very quiet for the rest of the afternoon; she cannot guess his thoughts.

* * *

Their research into Memory Charms, begun at Severus' insistence despite Granger's clear reluctance to fiddle with such things again, becomes a project that keeps them occupied for several years, spawning two papers that are published in _The London Charms Journal._ Their work begins as purely academic, Granger being too squeamish to entertain the notion of modifying the memories of even well-paid research volunteers, but eventually even she has to admit that all the well-researched hypotheses in the world are worth nothing without practical evidence to back them up. Severus is strangely proud the day she tells him she has rented lab space from the Wizarding division of the University of London, complete with an expensive and hard-to-come-by Pensieve. He throws his efforts into further book research; it is obvious that Granger's uncertainty as to whether or not she could have retrieved her parents' memories successfully, is a question that will haunt her always, never to be dispelled, is a question that will haunt her always, and Severus finds himself rather frantically determined to help her lay those particular ghosts, so to speak, to rest.

Granger works doggedly writing up their findings, though as time passes she tends to fall asleep over her work more and more often, sometimes slipping into a light doze while Severus is talking.

By the time their second paper on the topic has been published, Severus knows it will be their last.

* * *

One day, Hermione wakes, fully intending to go about her usual routine - bathe, dress, eat some toast with jam and drink a cup or two of tea before going to the shack to see Snape - but finds that she cannot quite muster the energy. She has to stop and sit down in the chair beside her bed after she has put on her trousers and blouse, her feet still bare. She thinks she must have nodded off for a bit, for the sun seems a good bit higher in the sky when next she looks out the window. With a bit of effort, she manages to put on her socks and boots, though negotiating the stairs feels like an enormous task, and she has to rest again at the bottom. The thought of food, or even tea, is unappealing; she thinks, lowering herself onto the bench beside the front door, that perhaps she'll just rest her eyes for a minute or two longer.

When she wakes, it is because Hugo has come in the door, a bag of groceries over one shoulder. He seems startled to see her sitting there, though perhaps not as startled as Hermione is, herself, to realize that it is early evening, the time he and Rose generally take it in turns to check in on her each day. How had that happened? she wonders fuzzily, and barely manages a reassuring, "I'm fine, love, just a bit tired today," in response to Hugo's concerned questions before she feels herself slipping away once again.

* * *

Hermione has not avoided thoughts of her own mortality as she has grown older, but still she finds herself rather surprised to realize that she is dying. She thinks that this ought to bother her more than it does, but she is so very tired, and everything feels rather at a remove. At least one or the other, though often both, of her children are by her side whenever she wakes, and she thinks with a hazy fondness that they are, truly, quite dear. But mostly she drifts in and out of consciousness like Snape drifting through the shack's empty rooms.

She thinks of Snape, quite suddenly, one moment between sleeping and waking, sees his face before her as clearly as though she is with him, and she opens her eyes with a start to find herself reaching out before her with trembling fingers.

* * *

_"I'll come live here, with you," she'd said to him, not so very long ago. Only weeks earlier, perhaps._

"Don't be absurd," he said. "What would you tell your children?"

"To come visit me here when I'm dead."

His eyes were wide and frantic, and she felt a twist of something bittersweet under her breastbone. "Don't you dare," he said, but his voice cracked unconvincingly on the last syllable. 

* * *

"Rose," Hermione says, opening her eyes to find her daughter watching her. Rose's bright hair has faded with age, and she looks, Hermione thinks, remarkably like Molly. Rose leans forward.

"What is it, Mum?" she says.

"There is something I have to tell you," Hermione says. The words seem to take longer to form than they should, but it is worth the effort it takes to speak because she is certain, at this moment, after all these years, that she must no longer remain silent.

* * *

Severus watches the woman ascend the hill from Hogsmeade. Her head is bowed against the wind, and her hands are thrust deep in the pockets of Granger's baggy brown cardigan. It has been, he thinks, more than a week since Granger was last here, and Severus knew, he bloody well _knew_ that her absence - she hasn't been away this long since Weasley's death - could only mean one thing. But it's still a shock, so profound that he nearly feels it pummel him in the chest, stunned by the almost-physicality of his reaction. For this woman, taller than Granger but with the same deliberate gait, would not be here unless Granger could not be.

"Professor Snape?" she says when she opens the shack's door. Her eyes find him among the shadows, where he is making no attempt to hide. If he were alive, he would be shaking all over.

"Is she dead?" he says before his courage fails him.

Though she looks little like her mother, the woman - Rose - must have the same quickness of mind, for she does not bother with introductions, and though her eyes are wet her voice is even when she says, "Yes. I'm so sorry."

Severus looks away, at the bookshelves Granger erected, the framed print of Potions ingredients, the neatly cleaned and mended curtains. The dust will return in force, soon, he thinks.

A moment passes, during which Severus endures Granger's daughter's scrutiny, and wishes her gone. Then she says, "My mother - she didn't tell anyone else, and I won't either, unless you want me to. She wanted to make sure you knew that. And she told me about the charms she has in place here." She pauses. "I would be very happy to keep them going for you, and to keep bringing you books. If you'd like."

"Thank you," Severus says; his voice sounds very unfamiliar and rather far away. "That is very kind of you."

"She didn't suffer at the end," she says. "It was very peaceful."

The sound that emerges from Severus' throat would have mortified him, not so long ago.

"Can I do anything?" Rose asks at last, and Severus forces himself to look at her. The look on her face is so reminiscent of her mother - a burning curiosity mingled with sympathy - that he has to look away again.

"No," he says, and then, again, "thank you."

"Of course," she says, reluctance clear in her voice, but she turns to go. "I'll come again soon."

After she is gone, despite the futility of the effort, Severus tries very hard to find release in tears. Dimly, he wonders what exactly Granger told her daughter about him. About them.

Finally, he drifts through the wall, unable to bear the closeness of the inside of the shack with all its reminders of her. He closes his eyes, feeling as though he is at the end of a fraying tether that could, quite easily, break; and then, for a blissful time, he feels nothing at all.

* * *

It is night when Severus comes to himself again, and the stars are brilliant against the vast purple sky. He feels empty, and very calm. The stars remind him of Dumbledore's robes, and he thinks he might have smirked but for the strange heaviness that seems to have settled over his form when he was… elsewhere. He cannot twitch so much as a finger. The realization is not as alarming as perhaps it should be.

Somewhere out there, Dumbledore actually _is._ As is Severus' mam, and his grandparents, and his school-days tormentors, and the man who styled himself Lord Voldemort. Lily is there, too, a thought that once filled Severus with fear but that now does not bother him very much at all.

And Granger. Granger is out there. The knowledge comforting, even if he does not know precisely where 'there' is. His reason for staying in this dreadful place for so long is suddenly quite clear, and he thinks, how like Granger, despite her brilliance, to overlook something so obvious.

Severus pretends to inhale, and for the first time since his death his chest actually seems to swell as his lungs fill with air. The sensation makes him feel, for the briefest of instants, very much alive, and is so unexpected that his eyes fly open. All he can see before him is the sky, rushing closer.

He exhales his breath, and lets go.

Author:


End file.
